Paul Wolfowitz, most publicly, making it a popular talking point among the Fox and Friends type community.
I’m surprised you never heard of that.
Direct link.
If you’re questioning the word “they”, then you need to be prepared to call the Undersecretary of Defense a maverick.
Taking out Saddam was a bonus, but it was never the goal.
911 happened and Afganistan was the direct result of going after the people who did it, planned it and ordered it executed, as you can read in the news, this is still ongoing.
Iraq was the response to the region and to the greater world at large. At best it was school yard diplomacy writ large. They pushed the States and the States pushed back harder.
Why Iraq, it was low hanging fruit. No real allies in the region, a history of using NBC weapons on civillians, a dictator out of central casting. Even as others have mentioned, its geography lent itself to land war 2k meets rolling thunder.
Had it really been about NBC weapons, it would have not been all that hard to seed former warsaw pact munitions in media fertile areas and simply wait. The discrepancies in the inspectors reports could have been exploited to explain the prescence of these newly found munitions, that none of the former Iraqi army or special corp could explain, gulf of tonkin redux.
Iraq got stomped and the rest of the world got the message.
Declan
Namely, that America is dangerously irrational and there’s no point in cooperating with its demands. Iraq tried, and look what happened.
By what measure is it less of a hell hole now?
I still remember being amazed by Powell’s presentation in that it was pretty obvious to me he had no real proof of WMD. It was a pathetic show. The evidence was amazingly thin and spun harder than my laundry.
When columnist Andrew Coyne wrote afterwards how “now we have absolute proof of WMD” (or words to that effect) I actually wrote him a letter saying, in effect, “Sir, you’re my favourite columnist. Love your work. But I am a former professional in the field of military intelligence and assure you that briefing contained no proof, and wasn’t very convincing at all.” He didn’t reply.
The thing is the discussion brings out a fundamental difference between conservative and liberal politics as practiced in the USA. It is to do with policy. In conservative headspace making policy is a stand alone. Then, in another room down the corridor and across a short flight of stairs there is the office for marketing policy.
If these two produce a similar product, that occurs only as a co-incidence. So in the case of Iraq obviously the policy making was obscure from the public (as the GOP likes it). By contrast the WMD claims were the marketing. Almost everyone understood this. Notably our on-board conservatives who joined in with gusto.
Hence the puzzlement of our conservative friends at any grief with the non-appearance of said WMD. That was merely the marketing. Similarly the freedom with which they now discuss the actual policy making. Although the concealing habit dies hard, there’s no pretense there was ever an evidence basis to claims made at the time but such luminaries as Colin Powell.
So you have to understand. Liberal politics - making and marketing of policy takes place in the same room. Conservative politics - they are different operational areas. Like any relationship this lead to a lot of frustration and bad feeling as the discussions between these 2 groups took place at cross purposes.
Maybe you didn’t intend this as a devastating criticism of conservatism but that’s what it is.
What you’re saying is that conservative policies can’t be supported on their own merits. Conservatives can’t say “we should invade Iraq because it will offer some big financial opportunities for my corporation” so they say “we should invade Iraq because it will make the world a safer place”. Conservatives can’t say “we should enact a tax policy that favors the rich because I’m rich” so they say “we should enact a tax policy that favors the rich because it’ll create jobs”. Conservatives can’t say “we should abolish environmental regulations because my company would make more profits if it didn’t have to follow them” so they say “we should abolish environmental regulations because they’re a violation of libertarian principles”.
Liberals, as you stated, don’t have this issue. They can admit what their motives are. They can say “we shouldn’t invade this country because we don’t think the issues involved are worth killing people over” or “we think women should be allowed to decide for themselves if they want an abortion because we believe in individual liberty” or “we think we should have a public health system that guarantees everyone access to health care because we think health care shouldn’t be dependent on how much money you have”. They don’t have to invent ways to “market” these ideas because there are no hidden motives behind them.
Correct. Henry Kissinger (Bush’s top advisor outside his immediate cabal), who had no personal motive for obfuscation, said this in almost so many words.
The world did get the message. Problem is, the message they got was that U.S.A. was deceitful, uncaring about foreign lives, and incompetent.
Like almost all Americans, I assumed Saddam did have WMD’s (e.g. nerve gas). I still strongly opposed the war because both invasion and aftermath posed severe risks and Saddam was already boxed-up and unlikely to use his WMD’s.
However Powell’s presentation flabbergasted me as well. I remember that he quoted bin Laden as calling Iraqis “his brothers” and Powell stated that that was proof of a connection. :smack: 
:smack: I was embarrassed for U.S.A. when I heard Powell present this as a “proof,” thinking any eighth-grader would realize the stupidity of such a claim.
I disagree with this. Marketing for conservative administrations exists only to sell what the policy makers want to sell. Truth and accuracy have nothing to do with it. (I don’t think you disagree with that.) They are not independent at all. If you’ve ever been involved with crafting a message to sell a heaping pile of crap, you’ll know what I mean.
Even if the Bushies really believed in the spreading liberty at the point of a bayonet message (and some might have been naive enough to do so) it was clear from the polls which John Mace so helpfully referenced for me that the American public would not commit their children and money to this effort. Thus the WMD story, which got shriller as it became less and less probable. Even that didn’t work, so they went ahead anyhow.
BTW, anyone responding with “but the Dems believed in them” should be aware that they were working off Bush intelligence, which some might have foolishly believed to not be a pack of lies.
What the rest of the world got was the message that America got its arse handed to it by Iran. The rest of the world, particularly the Arab world, had a good laugh at America’s failure over there, although in the Arab world it was tempered with the fact that we’d taken a country run by their Sunni brethren and handed it to the Iranians.
Remember this photograph? I’m sure you rmember the liberal media playing this endlessly for days, exulting in the humiliation of the Bush administration as after months and years of vowing “no timetable for withdrawl, no handover of power” that’s exactly what happened at a press conferecne in front of the world’s media that Bush sent Cheney to attend because he couldn’t face it. Except you’ve probably never seen this before because American media blacked it out.
This was Dick Cheney officially handing Iraq over to Grand Ayatollah Abdul-Aziz Al-Hakim, who is as the background suggests the leader of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq. This organisation used to be known as the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq until they and like-minded individuals won the Iraqi elections and got their Islamic revolution at which point they changed their name. Some of the like-minded individuals included Prime Minister maliki’s party, the Dawa Party, a group with a fine democratic tradition of car bombings, airplane hijackings and most memorably blowing up the US embassy in Kuwait in 1983.
Back when we invaded and Al_hakim’s lot were still known as the Supreme Council here’s how we viewed them:
28 March 2003 **Rumsfeld Warns Syria, Iranian Badr Corps Not to Interfere in Iraq **
Washington – Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld sent a warning March 28 to two of Iraq’s neighbors – Syria and Iran – not to interfere in coalition efforts to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime.
[…]
He also warned the Iranian-sponsored Badr Corps not to interfere with coalition military operations inside Iraq lest its members be considered “as combatants.”
[…]
Asked more about the Badr Corps, Rumsfeld said there are reports of numbers in the hundreds operating in Iraq and more on the other side of the border. He described the corps as “the military wing of the Supreme Council on Islamic Revolution in Iraq” and said it is “trained, equipped and directed by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard.” As yet, he said, the corps has not done anything that would be perceived by the coalition as hostile. But “the entrance into Iraq by military forces, intelligence personnel or proxies not under the direct operational control of [U.S. Central Command Commander] General [Tommy] Franks will be taken as a potential threat to coalition forces,” he said. Rumsfeld said the coalition would hold the Iranian government responsible for the corps’ actions, and armed Badr corps members found in Iraq “will have to be treated as combatants.”
http://www.usembassy-israel.org.il/publish/press/2003/march/032901.html
Those Badr Corps guys actually ran for election too, calling themselves
the Badr Party. They were part of the winning coalition.
I notice the phrase ‘neo-con’ hasn’t cropped up in this thread. Lest we forget, the basic philosophy of the people in power can, to some meaningful extent, be discerned in ‘Rebuilding America Defenses’, a report on bellaf of The Project for the New American Century’.
It’s in pdf and readily available.
It’s a shame he’ll be remembered for fronting that embarrassing nonsense. What was surprising at the time - looking at the USA from outside - was the willingness of the overwhelming majority to believe and accept what the President claimed. He was, of course, heavily aided by an unquestioning, even compliant, media.
The guy clearly had an ideological agenda, backed from his earlist political days by vested interests, UNSCOM had been hunting in situ for seven years and had exactly contrary data … and people still took him at face value.
Magic Negro effect
tall, deep voice, gravitas
Where was the shame in that? It was the highest point of a career of shitting out government propaganda.
Actually, “neo-conservatives” was mentioned rather early in the thread and Wolfowitz has also been cited. The reason that “neo-con” has not shown up, repeatedly, is simply that the topic has been more about the acceptance of the propaganda by the U.S. populace with less focus on the group that engineered the propaganda or their motives.