Concur with others have said - it’s complicated. None of us do most of the things we do because of one reason. I think there was a combination of:
I think he was scarred as the leader of the United States by the 9/11 attacks. He heard variations of “go get 'em” and “never again” when he traveled, and I think that had an impact on him. And lets not forget that the invasion was 18 months after 9/11. It’s easy to forget now, but in Washington and around the US, whenever a plane was heard, people reacted in fear. There was a palpable fear that the US was under attack, and in that mindset, the invasion against an enemy with WMDs was viewed differently.
WMDs. It’s never been clear to me that he knew there were no WMDs. And I haven’t seen evidence of that, previously, or here. I believe that he (and many others) truly thought there were WMDs. Do I think the CIA and other intelligence agencies leaned to that conclusion, partially because the WH was leaning in that direction? Perhaps. But I’m not sure that’s on the WH. As an analyst, you have to stick to your guns when you should, as should the CIA director.
A major political swing in the middle east was enticing. The possibility that Iraq could go from a harsh dictatorship, brutal to it’s own people and dangerous to other nations to a democracy was alluring to the the WH. Naive in retrospect probably.
The sanctions against Iraq couldn’t last forever, and there were increasing difficulties in keeping them in place. So if you believed that Iraq was dangerous and had WMDs, it was only going to get worse.
Let me ask you, Shodan, would you accept something like this if it wasn’t coming from a Republican?
Suppose it was Barack Obama and he was saying, *"Okay, Obamacare didn’t work. But I believed it would work at the time. Sure, a lot of experts at the time told me Obamacare was a bad idea and wouldn’t work. But I kept asking until I found some different experts who would tell me it would work. And I believed those experts instead of the first group.
So I got Obamacare passed into law. And as a result, thousands of patients have died. But that’s not my fault. I was only listening to what the experts told me and they told me it would work. If I had to do it all over again, I would do the same thing."*
Would you be saying, “He’s right. You can’t blame Obama for being wrong. He listened to some experts and did what they told him. It’s not his fault the experts were wrong. Obama was right to do what he did based on what he was knew at the time.”
I’m guessing the answer’s going to be no. That you’re going to say Obama was completely responsible for his mistake in a way that Bush was somehow not responsible for his. But I’m interested in seeing your response and how you justify it.
I’ve heard this argument before. And I feel it’s wrong.
We did not need to act in Iraq. It was not a situation that was going to go on indefinitely. The sanctions had been working for twelve years and there were no signs that they couldn’t work for another twelve years.
Saddam Hussein was 66 years old in 2003. All we needed to do was sit back and wait. Time was on our side.
Well, I’m not Shodan, but basically if someone came up with some CT that Obama really did know it would fail but decided to do it anyway because profit is always number 3, then I’d say the same thing I’m saying here…the simplest explanation is that he really did think it would work and then cherry picked data to confirm his believe.
For my part, I don’t think this lets Bush et al off the hook in any way, shape or form. I’m unsure why people take this that way or why it riles so many. I get that it’s easier to paint him as totally evil if he knew there were no WMD and did it anyway, but it doesn’t excuse him because he really believed there were…he was wrong, he cherry picked the data and surrounded himself with an echo chamber on this and took us to war for all the wrong reasons, ignoring the war we already had and putting it on the back burner, ensuring it was a cluster fuck as well. It was quite possibly the biggest US foreign policy fuck-up in our history and we continue to pay for it today and will for years to come.
Hindsight. I agree, in hindsight we didn’t need to do anything more than what we did in Libya or the other places where Arab Spring toppled regimes, but we didn’t know any of this in 2003. The sanctions certainly wouldn’t have lasted forever…in fact, I think that history has shown that as US administrations change and the public becomes more apathetic about an issue, they certainly can and have changed. We no longer have the same level of sanctions against Iran, or Cuba…and the only reason they have ramped up against North Korea is that they are idiots of epic proportions, on par with our current president.
This isn’t to say we should have invaded, but saying we could just wait and see is hindsight at this point. With obvious hindsight, we COULD have waited until Iraq basically degenerated into what’s going on in Syria today. I’m not sure if the outcome for Iraq would have been better, or what the US et al might have done at that point (or what Iran would have done, especially in light of what they are doing in both Iraq and Syria today), or what the other world powers might or might not have done, but for the US in the short term it would have been better for us to have stayed out of it until we were forced to do something down the road.
Bush believed that he had a religious mission to spread the benefits of liberal democracy and American values all over the world. That other peoples might not share American values didn’t really ever bother him or cross his mind. I don’t think it’s really any more complicated than that.
The sanctions against Cuba are coming back. Turmp made it quite clear that the Cuba reforms are one of the many aspects of the Obama presidency he wants to reverse.
Maybe so, maybe no. With Trump I’ll believe when I see it…and I see it actually implemented. Until then, I regard anything he says as complete horseshit. For instance, he’s been on again off again about sanctions on China for trade violations. What will it be this week? He’s threatened sanctions on Mexico but I’ve yet to see anything concrete. Cuba? Yeah, could be…but will it?
My point, however, is that it changes from administration to administration, which seems to be born up by your own input here…Obama relaxed them, Trump (maybe) will change that. When Trump quits next year, assuming he follows through on Cuba, what will it be then?
I think you are confusing after-the-fact with before-the-fact. Or maybe what a President should have known with what he wanted to believe. The head of the CIA told Bush that the case for Iraq’s WMD was a “slam dunk”. That Iraq was seeking nuclear weapons was generally substantiated by the intelligence, with some dissenting voices.
The idea that Iraq had any sort of nuclear program was totally debunked before Colin Powell gave the famous speech for which he will forever be ashamed. But Powell may have been unaware that the evidence was fraudulent — that it was all a Dick Cheney fraud (with some assistance via Tony Blair). Cheney positioned himself as a go-between from The CIA to Bush’s ear, so that Administration officials — probably including George W. Bush himself — were fed lies and denied access to the actual conclusions of CIA analysis.
Now, Saddam was certainly known to have deployed mustard gas and also worked on developing poisons of mass destruction, including tabun gas, sarin gas, and even botulin. The U.S.A. was well aware of this because Cheney and his ilk had helped Saddam develop these poisons in the 1980’s. Most analysts, I think, assumed that at least some small stocks of nerve gas would be found, justifying the claim about “mass destruction” even though these were not the weapons the U.S. pretended to be worried about.
Of course no nuclear program was discovered — that was a complete hoax advanced by Cheney and his ilk. But no sarin or tabun was discovered either! The sanctions and inspections had done their job. (Some say that Saddam himself thought he had nerve gas — his weapons developers were afraid to tell him they lacked the resources to manufacture them!)
A tiny bit of mustard gas was discovered. This is a low-tech poison invented in 1822 and applied in warfare as early as 1917. That’s your Iraqi WMD.
Nobody seriously disagreed that Iraq was seeking nuclear weapons. The question was whether they had the capacity to obtain the technology and produce them with sanctions and the inspection regime in place - and the claim that they did was not substantiated at all.
The administration sold the invasion to the public by repeatedly implying that Iraqi nuclear capability was imminent. “We cannot let the smoking gun be a mushroom cloud,” said Cheney. That was utter bullshit.
The same is true of the claim - not advanced by you - that “there were WMDs because we found chemical weapons.” There were, and we did. But they weren’t the WMDs we were looking for.
Was this supposed to be a rebuttal to what I wrote or, well, just a stream of consciousness? What GWB and his gang BELIEVED was obviously different than reality, but it still was formative in why they did what they did…which is what the OP was asking.
Rational to who? I think all of the reasons Nemo delineated there was a part of the picture as to why GWB and the rest pushed for the invasion. The weakest, to me, is the money could be made…I seriously doubt that was a primary motivation, though I know it’s a given on this board that this was the real reason. But polishing his legacy as the guy who Brought Democracy to the Middle East(tm…arr)? Yeah, that was definitely part of it. Being shown that he was Doing Something? Yeah, definitely. Removing a dangerous rogue regime from the board, especially after the freight from 9/11? Yup. And he was willing to cherry pick the data to ‘prove’ that Saddam et al was a threat because he knows, in his bones, that they were just tricking those idiots at the UN and that Iraq was chalk full of WMD behind every tree and Bush, and the proof would be there for all to see once we had removed Saddam.
Now I am confused. My post specifically mentioned GWB as possibly NOT being “in with the in crowd” as far as access to real (un-Cheneyized) CIA analysis. Given this, no post with “GWB and his gang” used as the subject can possibly be directed at me.
If, afterall, you were addressing my remark please rephrase your question to name specific individual(s) rather than “GWB and his gang.”
Well, I’m confused by your confusion. What did you mean by ‘That’s your Iraqi WMD. :p’? I guess what you are saying is you believe that Cheney and the CIA ‘knew’ that there were in fact no WMD and they were the ones who lied about it (or spun the evidence to ‘prove’ to GWB that they were real), no? I don’t believe that either, except the spinning part.
(If I’m misreading this, let me know…I’m doing this from my phone and I generally am a lot less coherent when posting from this or reading for content…and that’s saying something, considering even my ‘good’ posts can be pretty incoherent :p)
IIRC there was a sizable faction that felt that the Gulf War was unfinished business, and that after 9/11, it was a good opportunity to finish that Iraq business up. WMDs were just a cover argument.
If necessary, we’ll need a weapons expert to comment on the use of sarin or other nerve gas as a weapon. Yes, it’s surely a big problem especially if sufficient stores are available,** but nerve gas is not the long-term threat (nuclear weapons) that Bush et al proposed** as their casus belli.
Correct, if you replace “WMD” with uranium stockpiles or A-bomb development.
As I’ve said, I think Cheney and others assumed some stores of nerve gas would turn up and they could spin that as the WMD’s they were looking for. (Many countries have the technology to manufacture nerve gas. Ironically, due to sanctions Iraq was one of the few developed countries which could not produce nerve gas.)
When did Saddam say he had no WMDs? Because of course he had many tonnes of them. He even used them on his own people. This was of course before the first Iran invasion, Desert storm.
After Desert storm there were still many tonnes of WMDs unaccounted for. Saddam stopped cooperating and started to brag he was restarting his WMD programs. He was doing stuff that made it look like he was going for nukes again.
So, when GWB threatened SH with force unless SH let Blix is, there were credible reasons to believe SH had WMDs - or at least a program.
HOWEVER, then SH *did *let Blix in, and Blix found little or no evidence. Sure SH was obstructive, and before he let Blix in he sent several truckloads of *something *to Syria, but Blix was doing his job.
Then GWD decided to invade anyway, and there plain was just no reason for it.
It turns out that indeed there were WMDs in Iran- most of which were rusting in lost/hidden places in the desert, more dangerous to the environment that as weapons. There were also some missiles that had been illegally converted. None of which is justification.
What GWB and his gang BELIEVED was obviously different than reality, but it still was formative in why they did what they did…which is what the OP was asking.