The official line was that Saddam helped fund Al Qaida, and that he had a stockpile of WMDs he was refusing to hand over. Since then, both premises have been proven false, and the general consensus is that GWB, the intelligence community, and his inner circle all knew they were false at the time.
Whenever anyone at the time asked him why the USA invaded Iraq, Bush changed the subject or made a joke until everybody eventually just stopped asking.
These days we have a lot more insight about the political situation at the time, and it’s easier to take a more objective perspective. So far, none of the usual explanations are convincing to me. It certainly wasn’t the cheesy easy explanations like “Bush was mad at Saddam for trying to kill his father” or “Bush wanted to look macho.” There was a realpolitik reason for it, I’m sure, but I’m at a loss for what the administration hoped to gain from the invasion.
Fair enough. I thought it was settled, but apparently not.
To start, there was the pre-war intelligence assessment by the CIA, which was heavily edited by the administration to remove qualifying statements that expressed doubt to the extent of Saddam’s arsenal and links to Al Qaida.
Then, there was the Valerie Plame scandal, in which the administration punished ambassador Joseph Wilson for making the case that the GWB administration purposely manipulated intelligence to make the case for war against Iraq. A GWB administration member was actually sentenced for this, and pardoned by GWB himself.
But before you decide to debate this particular point (that GWB did not decide to go to war over WMDs and support for Al Qaida) please tell me what you think the actual reasons for the war were. I don’t want to have a debate unless it’s in good faith. Do you assert that the war actually was about WMDs and support for Al Qaida?
Bush was a true believer. He believed in the neo-con rhetoric that all America had to do was show up in Iraq and the people would welcome us. American values are so perfect that everyone believes in them and is just waiting for a chance to turn their own country into America’s little brother. Bush figured the war would be quick and easy and he’d earn a reputation as a brilliant war leader and statesman.
Bush wanted to be persuaded. Bush chose to surround himself by yes-men. He did not want to hear dissenting views. He liked being told that the things he already believed were true. So when he believed Iraq was working on WMD programs, he wanted to only hear evidence that this was true. And the people around him told him what he wanted to hear. He dismissed all of the people who were saying there was more evidence pointing in the other direction because they weren’t part of his inner circle.
There was money to be made. Bush’s primary motive was his legacy. But there were plenty of other people around him who knew that wars produce a flood of government money. And they wanted a share of it. They wanted to America to go to war so they could make a profit. (Sure, there was already a war going on in Afghanistan but there were a lot more opportunities in Iraq.) So they fed the push towards war.
I have no idea who these “liberals” are who are running around inside your head.
But nobody was saying we should trust Saddam. The reason people said there were no active WMD programs in 2003 was because there were inspection teams all over the country. Sure, Saddam didn’t co-operate with them and tried to obstruct them. But they were able to do their job well enough to see that there was no credible evidence of active WMD programs.
And if you want to argue over their abilities, remember that we occupied Iraq. And found out that the inspectors were completely right. It was the people who argued the other side who were wrong.
Are you trying to make this argument in a time machine from 2003?
Because it turns out with the knowledge of what actually happened, Saddam was telling the truth and the Americans were the liars.
In any case, “Saddam is a liar” is insufficient justification to knock over his country and kill and displace millions of people and keep the middle east in disarray. The burden of proof was on us to show that there was some compelling need for this. There was not.
Exactly.
It is too soon to be saying “knowing what we know now”. For all we know PNAC might still be in full swing and GWB could just be one pawn in the game, not the great leader of it.
Different Bush advisers had different reasons for wanting war. Henry Kissinger was a top Bush adviser and is quoted in State of Denial :
[QUOTE=Henry Kissinger]
“Because Afghanistan wasn’t enough. [In the conflict with radical Islam they want to humiliate us.] And we need to humiliate them.”
[/QUOTE]
Kissinger’s reasoning, sick as it was, may have been less sick than that of other Bush advisers. Karl Rove was surely focused on the domestic political advantages of a major war. Dick Cheney rubbed his hands in glee at the chance to reward his fellow super-rich munitions manufacturers. Rumsfeld saw a delicious chance to test his new theories of warfare. Douglas Feith, the lower-level SecDef official most famous for overseeing the Abu Ghraib tortures, was a bizarre thinker who felt the Bush Administration must change the world quickly “before ‘realists’ were back in charge.”
Although in hindsight we know the “weapons of mass destruction” were a complete hoax, most Americans at the time never guessed that the Bush Administration had cynically hand-picked refutable evidence for WMDs and Al-Qaeda involvement. Bush himself, who proudly bragged that “vision” was not his thing, may not have been as Machiavellian in his call for war as Kissinger, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, etc. but he had been encouraging war planning against Iraq since he was inaugurated, many months before the attacks of 11 September. Some insiders say he was eager to fight Saddam for any excuse.
The evil and incompetence of the GWB Administration is shocking to anyone objective enough to look at the evidence. That GWB is no longer considered the very worst President is a sad commentary on how dire things are now.
Actually, he did cooperate with them. Grudgingly at first, but in his final report before Bush yanked him out of Iraq, Hans Blix (the head of the UN inspection team) said that Iraq was being not only cooperative, but proactive. He said that no sign of WMD factories or stockpiles had been found, and that remaining discrepancies (mostly having to do with a lack of documentation on destroyed stockpiles) could be cleared up in a few months. The only violation of any UN weapons sanctions found were some conventional missiles that were projected (not proven) to fly about 14 miles farther than the allowed 93 miles (the US is 6000 miles from Iraq), and those missiles were being destroyed. He concluded that the continued presence of the inspection teams would make it impossible for Iraq to develop WMDs without their knowledge. In other words, the diplomatic solution had succeeded.
That report was presented to the UN Security Council on March 7, 2003, two weeks before Bush invaded. No matter what he thought in 2002, no matter what the CIA told him in 2002, Bush knew for a fact that Saddam did not pose an imminent threat to the US when he invaded in 2003.
But the AUMF passed by Congress in October 2002 required Bush to certify in writing, before he invaded, that diplomacy had failed to end the threat of WMDs, and that nothing short of invasion could protect the US from Iraq. And that lying bastard had no problem lying to Congress in writing.
Sadly, no. There are still many idiots, probably about 35% of the electorate, who think it was an honest mistake based on faulty intelligence. Assholes like Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, and Bush himself still push that garbage, and the stupid and ignorant lap it up. But the Blix report I cited in my previous post proves what BS that is.
Kudos for admitting a mistake. Not enough people are willing to do that around here.
I’m not sure what any of that is supposed to prove, so you’ll have to elaborate.
As they used to say in Lost a lot: It’s complicated.
Someone already mentioned PNAC. Bush (GWB) was not a member, but many of his cabinet/advisers were and he was certainly influenced by them. Frankly, I don’t think we’ll ever know what his “true” motivations were, but I think we can safely say that he wanted to invade Iraq and the reason(s) for doing so were presented to us after-the-fact. That is: We need to invade Iraq, so let’s see what kind of case we can build. Wolfowitz famously said (paraphrasing) that WMDs were simply the best/most convenient/most convincing argument. I think many folks really did think WMDs were a “slam dunk”, and so that was paraded out in front of us. And as some folks began doubting that, other “reasons” were given, as well. Just read the AUMF if you want to see what all the supposed reasons were. But the war was a foregone conclusion as long as Bush could get away with it.
We’ve been through this a million times on this MB, so I’ll not go on about it, but my sense was always: So what if they have WMD’s? Everybody and his brother has WMDs of some sort. We’ve got the guy hemmed in like nobody’s business, so let’s not poke the hornet’s nest. I was (and still am to some extent) much more worried about Pakistan and some of the former Soviet Republics when it comes to WMDs getting into the hands of terrorists. And no, I was not in favor of invading those countries, either. But “WMDs” were the new bogeyman and a mere mention of the term was supposed to send shivers down our spines. I never felt those shivers.
I think fear and arrogance. GWB et al were caught flat footed by the attack, and I think that through cherry picking and self-delusion they convinced themselves that Saddam and Iraq were a greater threat to the US through their support (mostly made up) of terrorists and the possibility they could or would give WMD to said terrorists.
They have been proven false in hindsight, but I don’t think that there is any evidence showing that GWB and his merry men BELIEVED that they weren’t there. I’m pretty sure they did, in fact. Hell, I’m convinced that some of them (GWB especially) STILL think they were there.
Basically, their actions don’t make sense if they knew the things weren’t there. Why harp on it if they knew that, once we were in the country we would find nothing at all? :dubious:
So, to get back to your OP, I think that trying to dig for some CT in this is silly…the simple explanation is that GWB did think there were WMD, they cherry picked data so they could demonstrate this to drum up support for the war. They were afraid that Saddam really did have the things, and convinced he had been pulling the wool over the UN’s eyes for years, and that he would give them to terrorists bent on attacking the US. They under rated what it would take to invade (i.e. they went with the minimum number of troops to try and make the invasion more appealing from a monetary perspective), under rated the response and ramifications of things like disbanding the Iraqi army AND security forces and under rated the amount of sectarian tension that was simmering away in the country, barely held in check and ready to explode. In short, they fucked up by the numbers.
My understanding is that it was believed that the grateful Iraqi public would gladly de-nationalize their oil industry and allow US corporations to come in and pump oil … Halberton Inc. in particular … otherwise the UN inspectors were doing a great job keeping Saddam’s WMD programs in check …
One theory is that we were duped into it by Iranian intelligence by way of Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress. Chalabi and the INC were the source of a lot of the false intelligence about Iraq. It’s been reported that US intelligence knows he had links to Iranian intelligence and passed secret US info to them.
If this is true, it must be one of the greatest intelligence operations in history. They tricked us into wiping out their mortal enemy Saddam and his government, and weakening ourselves in the process. Running up debt, losing soldiers, making the public weary of war, and ruining our international reputation.
