The people behind Iraq invasion were all part of 'Project for a New American Century' which promoted 'Pax Americana' in the Middle East, i.e. a stabilizing occupying force, probably the overthrow of Iraq and Syria.
They envisioned Iraq being a little more like Gulf States i.e. more stable, allies, and a buffer between Israel/Iran/Saudi Arabia.
And some nice construction contracts for Bechtel.
And a geostrategic signal of power.
The WMD thing was a populist narrative justification, the real motivation is literally published for all to see, it's just not what the media war was fought over.
Nobody ever fought a war for purely altruistic motives, it's unlikely the Americans were to have joined WW2 unless they were at risk themselves, but that doesn't mean there can't be motives and actions that are better than others.
Weirdly, the justification for Iraq I think would have been entirely function of historical revisionism given the success or failure. If Iraq was more stable and prosperous then 'it was the right thing to do', if the invasion was a failure, then it 'was a mistake' and that's it. Iraq has $5K/USD per capita GDP now, it has a government, elections, there's progress. Iran has a lot of control and of course Kurds are doing their own thing, but there is baseline order. 'Was It Worth It?' is another question, maybe in 50 years we can understand definitively what the real cost of finally getting rid of a Saddam-like institution was.
Yes, definitely partly, manifestation of that I believe.
But it's complicated though ... the US is a huge part in keeping up that set of dominos that is the international order. But it doesn't mix well with hyper nationalism either, and definitely not military adventurism either.
Sick of hearing these nonsense hidden reasons that are completely without merit. The reasons we went to war were very clear, 'Saddam was stockpiling WMDs and was a threat to world.'. They were wrong, they simply made a colossal mistake.
I'm sick of hearing weak US cope defending a sick crime perpetrated by know fabulators like Rumsfeld and Cheney. They ran a similar creating writing program back during the cold war, inventing the "missile gap" with similarly imaginary facts.
If you look on a map, Iraq and Afghanistan are both border states with Iran, one on either side. Do you think that's just a coincidence?
I'm not saying either was a good idea at the time, and they were both obviously bad ideas with hindsight, but it seems there was possibly a greater strategy at play.
The publicly stated reasons for going to war, and the actual reasons, are different, though obviously related.
Regular citizens generally are not going to buy into complicated arguments or vague, geostrategic issues, they often need clear, more unambiguous line of reasoning. Especially those that align with their supposed values.
The proles need to hear stories about 'Freedom' and 'Democracy' and 'Evil Tyrants' and scary things about 'Masses of Chemical Weapons'.
US leadership wanted to enter WW2 long before the American public could be convinced. It took an attack on American soil, and dead Americans to tilt public opinion.
The US used a 'False Flag' (Gulf of Tonkin) operation in Vietnam to help build public support and credibility for intervention in Vietnam.
George Bush proposed a 'False Flag' UN airplane incident apparently, an idea that was quashed.
This is the case in every war, without getting too controversial, even the US revolutionary war.
It all seems kind of Machiavellian and duplicitous, and it is, but it's also the reality of leadership in ugly scenarios. Imagine that you're the leader of a nation that really, really needs to do something that the plebes don't want to do? It's a weird kind of moral dilemma.
FYI I'm not justifying any of these decisions, just illustrating the incongruity between actual planning, and the marketing / communicating of it.
COVID is an example of that, it's a massive exercise in 'Public Communications' where the stakes are existential. What we are being told publicly i.e. the 'Narrative' isn't a lie by any means, but it's definitely designed to create outcomes.
So:
" The reasons we went to war were very clear, 'Saddam was stockpiling WMDs and was a threat to world.'. "
No, that's just what they said publicly. That's how war was 'marketed'.
Also - they used the term 'Terrorism' a lot with respect to Saddam, i.e. 'War On Terror'. Of course, Saddam was definitely not a radical religious terrorist, he was basically the opposite of that.
Everyone pushing for the war knew that the material evidence for WMD's was pretty weak.
PNAC made several publications before Bush came to power, and the public members of PNAC literally filled the White House.
Those who were against (or more Dovish) on the war i.e. Colin Powell and Condi Rice - were the not part of PNAC.
So imagine if there was this 'Think Tank X' that wanted to push for some thing, 'X' and then when Biden comes to power, more than 1/2 of his Cabinet is literally from this special 'Think Tank X' and then after 1 year, the all push hard for this 'X thing' but communicate it to the public as 'Y'?
You can hardly say it's about 'Y'.
It's about 'X', it's fairly clear.
There were 17 members of PNAC in the White House. And the President's own Brother.
They envisioned Iraq being a little more like Gulf States i.e. more stable, allies, and a buffer between Israel/Iran/Saudi Arabia.
And some nice construction contracts for Bechtel.
And a geostrategic signal of power.
The WMD thing was a populist narrative justification, the real motivation is literally published for all to see, it's just not what the media war was fought over.
Nobody ever fought a war for purely altruistic motives, it's unlikely the Americans were to have joined WW2 unless they were at risk themselves, but that doesn't mean there can't be motives and actions that are better than others.
Weirdly, the justification for Iraq I think would have been entirely function of historical revisionism given the success or failure. If Iraq was more stable and prosperous then 'it was the right thing to do', if the invasion was a failure, then it 'was a mistake' and that's it. Iraq has $5K/USD per capita GDP now, it has a government, elections, there's progress. Iran has a lot of control and of course Kurds are doing their own thing, but there is baseline order. 'Was It Worth It?' is another question, maybe in 50 years we can understand definitively what the real cost of finally getting rid of a Saddam-like institution was.
[1] https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Project_for_the_New_Am...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_C...