Two Cheers for Bargaining Theory Two Cheers for David A. Lake Bargaining Theory Assessing Rationalist Explanations of the Iraq War The Iraq War has been one of the most signiªcant events in world politics since the end of the Cold War. One of the ªrst preventive wars in history, it cost trillions of dollars, re- sulted in more than 4,500 U.S. and coalition casualties (to date), caused enor- mous suffering in Iraq, and may have spurred greater anti-Americanism in the Middle East even while reducing potential threats to the United States and its allies. Yet, despite its profound importance, the causes of the war have re- ceived little sustained analysis from scholars of international relations.1 Al- though there have been many descriptions of the lead-up to the war, the ªghting, and the occupation, these largely journalistic accounts explain how but not why the war occurred.2 In this article, I assess a leading academic theory of conºict—the rationalist approach to war or, simply, bargaining theory—as one possible explanation of the Iraq War.3 Bargaining theory is currently the dominant approach in conºict David A. Lake is Jerri-Ann and Gary E. Jacobs Professor of Social Sciences, Distinguished Professor of Political Science, and Associate Dean of Social Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author, most recently, of Hierarchy in International Relations (Cornell University Press, 2009). The author is indebted to Peter Gourevitch, Stephan Haggard, Miles Kahler, James Long, Rose McDermott, Etel Solingen, and Barbara Walter for helpful discussions on Iraq or comments on this article. The anonymous reviewers provided enormously helpful suggestions for revisions. He gratefully acknowledges the ªnancial and institutional support of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. 1. Positive theories of the Iraq War are few. See Daniel Byman, “An Autopsy of the Iraq Debacle: Policy Failure or Bridge Too Far?” Security Studies, Vol. 17, No. 4 (October 2008), pp. 599–643; An- drew Flibbert, “The Road to Baghdad: Ideas and Intellectuals in Explanations of the Iraq War,” Se- curity Studies, Vol. 15, No. 2 (April–June 2006), pp. 310–352; Jacek Kugler, Ronald L. Tammen, and Brian Eªrd, “Integrating Theory and Policy: Global Implications of the War in Iraq,” International Studies Review, Vol. 6, No. 4 (December 2004), pp. 163–179; and David Mitchell and Tansa George Massoud, “Anatomy of Failure: Bush’s Decision-Making Process and the Iraq War,” Foreign Policy Analysis, Vol. 5, No. 3 (July 2009), pp. 265–286. 2. Among other largely journalistic accounts, see Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay, America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2003); Michael Isikoff and David Corn, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War (New York: Three Rivers, 2007); James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (New York: Penguin, 2004); George Packer, The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005); and Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin, 2006). 3. James D. Fearon, “Rationalist Explanations for War,” International Organization, Vol. 49, No. 3 (Summer 1995), pp. 379–414; Robert Powell, In the Shadow of Power: States and Strategies in Interna- tional Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999); Dan Reiter, “Exploring the Bar- gaining Model of War,” Perspectives on Politics, Vol. 1, No. 1 (March 2003), pp. 27–43; and International Security, Vol. 35, No. 3 (Winter 2010/11), pp. 7–52 © 2010 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 7 International Security 35:3 8 studies, providing the workhorse model for many theories of crisis, escalation, and civil and interstate war.4 Bargaining theory correctly directs attention to the inherently strategic nature of all wars. Given the inevitable costs of ªght- ing, the theory forces analysts to explain why states use the inefªcient mecha- nism of war to settle disagreements. Most important, it highlights problems of credible commitment and asymmetric information that lead conºicts of inter- est, ubiquitous in international relations, to turn violent. As I discuss below, these strategic interactions were central to the outbreak of war in 2003. Despite its prominence, however, bargaining theory is an inadequate expla- nation of the Iraq War. The bargaining failures central to the conºict were not those expected by the theory. As presently developed, bargaining theory makes four central assumptions that either ignore or critically distort key fac- tors that led to war between the United States and Iraq in 2003. Listed here in order of increasing importance, each assumption must be modiªed with sub- stantial consequences for the theory if scholars are to explain the Iraq War, and possibly other conºicts as well. First, bargaining theory assumes that states are unitary actors. As the Iraq case demonstrates, domestic political actors played an important role in driv- ing the United States and Iraq to war. Indeed, popular discourse often implied that oil companies or the military-industrial complex in the United States was a major cause of the turn to violence. An extension of bargaining theory and an examination of the case suggest that particularistic interests such as these can—and likely did—increase the belligerency of the United States. Yet, only under unlikely conditions that did not obtain in this case can such groups be sufªcient to bring about war in the absence of other sources of bargaining fail- ure. The war was not fought for Exxon or Halliburton, as protestors often charged, but these special interests did make a peaceful resolution of the dis- pute with Iraq more difªcult to achieve. Second, bargaining theory is now modeled in two-player games. In the Iraq R. Harrison Wagner, “Bargaining and War,” American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 44, No. 3 (July 2000), pp. 469–484. One of earliest statements of bargaining theory comes from a history of se- lected wars. See Geoffrey Blainey, The Causes of War, 3d ed. (New York: Free Press, 1988), especially pp. 292–294. The ªrst formal model was Donald Wittman, “How a War Ends: A Rational Model Approach,” Journal of Conºict Resolution, Vol. 23, No. 4 (December 1979), pp. 743–763. 4. See Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, James D. Morrow, Randolph M. Siverson, and Alastair Smith, “An Institutional Explanation of the Democratic Peace,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 93, No. 4 (December 1999), pp. 791–807; Kenneth A. Schultz, Democracy and Coercive Diplomacy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Dan Reiter and Allan C. Stam, Democracies at War (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002); and David A. Lake, “International Relations Theory and Internal Conºict: Insights from the Interstices,” International Studies Review, Vol. 5, No. 4 (December 2003), pp. 81–89. Two Cheers for Bargaining Theory 9 War, this analytic simpliªcation masks important dynamics. Although a for- mal n-actor model is not analyzed here, multiple actors appear to magnify problems of asymmetric information and costly signaling. Multiple audiences hear the same signal with possibly different effects. Knowing this, leaders may be reluctant to signal in ways that might reduce the risk of war with one audi- ence for fear of increasing the risk of conºict with others. In the lead-up to the Iraq War, Saddam Hussein was unwilling to signal clearly that he had disman- tled his weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs and thus ran a higher risk of conºict with the United States in order to deter challenges from his Shiite and Kurdish minorities and regional rivals, especially Iran. Future re- search on war must examine the problem of signaling in the presence of multi- ple audiences. Third, bargaining theory assumes that a war is over once a settlement is reached. The Iraq War makes clear that the conºict process extends long past the declaration of “mission accomplished” and continues into the postwar “peace.” The decision to go to war, in turn, rests crucially on assumptions about the costs of enforcing the settlement that are now untheorized. Had the costs of governing Iraq after the declaration of victory been properly assessed, even the George W. Bush administration might have been deterred from launching a preventive war. The Iraq War demonstrates what happens when this phase is ignored. The postwar peace is an important additional stage of conºict that needs to be integrated into the bargaining framework. Finally, bargaining theory assumes that states act rationally, as made explicit in the title of James Fearon’s classic statement of the approach.5 The United States and Iraq were clearly intentionalist, in that they developed strategies to attain their goals cognizant of the possible strategies of the other; they were, in this sense, minimally rational. In the Iraq War, however, the key information failures were rooted in cognitive biases in decisionmaking, not intentional mis- representations by the opponent. Indeed, both the United States and Iraq en- gaged in self-delusions, biased decisionmaking, and failures to update prior beliefs that are inconsistent with the assumption that actors will seek out and use all available information. These deviations from rationality suggest possi- ble gains from integrating bargaining theory with the sorts of cognitive biases identiªed by scholars in an earlier literature on misperception.6 Emphasizing 5. Fearon, “Rationalist Explanations for War.” 6. The classic studies are Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Prince- ton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976); Irving I. Janis and Leon Mann, Decision Making: A Psy- chological Analysis of Conºict, Choice, and Commitment (New York: Free Press, 1977); and John D.