And in 2003 I saw it happen here. A lot of americans were ready to take on the entire world (if necessary) because they were sure we were strong enough. Even today the Senate cafeteria labels their fried potatoes “Freedom Fries” because back then we were mad at the cheese-eating surrender monkeys and nobody’s told the cafeteria staff they can change it back. “Punish france, ignore germany, forgive russia.” It’s extra easy to believe you’re right when you have all the power.

And we still have some power. As long as nobody can damage our aircraft carriers we control the world’s blue-water oceans. We can nuke anybody in the world and most nations can’t nuke us back. our army can defeat essentially any army in the world provided we have a year to preposition supplies. These three things would be irrelevant in a sane world. But it’s US sanity that’s the issue. We can make them relevant. We hate to lose. And if the time comes that those are the only three cards we have to play, we’ll play them.

If you are trying to walk the decision making process back for the United States in this particular war I think it would be productive to look at the various expectations of cost (blood and treasure).

I don’t think the ever changing rationales are causing concern among US citizens – I think it’s that objectively by each successive argument the US is losing. Check this excerpt from a 1999 Washington Post article (see link) discussing acceptable casualties in a hypothetical Iraq War:

“Collectively, these results suggest that a majority of the American people will accept combat deaths—so long as the mission has the potential to be successful. The public can distinguish between suffering defeat and suffering casualties.”

Multiple causes are only troublesome if they all fail.

So the WMD argument doesn’t actually depend on any existing WMDs or even an existing WMD program. We believed that Saddam wanted nukes. Unless we did something immediately he’d have them 5 years after the sanctions stopped. And we couldn’t persuade the rest of the world to continue the sanctions.

This (or very similar) thoughtful argument is well amplified in this exile.ru editorial. Enjoy.

It’s a bit like the problem you can have at a business meeting when there are too many items on the agenda and decisions on some items have a bearing on others. Somewhere on the web you will find a sad little work called The Plan with the punchline: This is how shit happens.

If nukes for Saddam in 5 years was unacceptable, then the best time to stop it was immediately.

A telling point, J. The problem is that Iraq is not the only foreign country. Countries like Sweden, Canada and Japan have the capability to develop nukes in 6 months.

So while it might be necessary to invade Iraq, by invading Iraq first this Administration has shown an inability to prioritise.

As my comment suggested, this was pretty much the opposite of the sequence of events in Iraq.

This is not obvious at all; in fact you’re way off here. I think for most people the obvious response would be to follow procedures provided by the international law. That’s what Nicaragua did when it was attacked by the US.

To follow your logic, only powerful countries should be able to respond to an attack and they can attack less powerful countries with impunity. It doesn’t make sense.

The US has shown over the last couple of decades, including the Marine Barracks, Gulf War, and any number of other Islamic radical attacks, that it will offer only a wimpy response such as firing a few cruise missiles from hundreds of miles away into compounds in Afghanistan, or withdrawing marines. It was necessary to disabuse certain parties of this notion. Sadaam was evil, was surely connected to terrorism (though not 9/11), and weak. A functioning and reasonably civilized government in Iraq will change the entire dynamic in the Middle East. Hence, it is worth the effort.

The war was inevitable given our majority assumptions at the time. First, look at the WMD argument. If Saddam wanted nukes, and if he had no nuke program at all, and if the sanctions were relaxed, iraq would have nukes in 5 years. They had the trained physicists and engineers. Without sanctions they’d have money and imports.

If nukes for Saddam in 5 years was unacceptable, then the best time to stop it was immediately. Once the sanctions stopped, Saddam would have a lot of money, and he’d have a lot of new conventional weapons, and he’d have a lot of great propaganda. Iraqi poets and novelists etc would go around the world. They’d write about what life was like under sanctions, and it would look like a warcrime during peacetime. Literate women would publish stories about their babies dying of uncontrollable diarrhea because they weren’t allowed to buy medicine. Our chance of getting the rest of the world to agree to invasion or even new sanctions would be nil, even if we had dependable proof of a nuclear program.

So the WMD argument doesn’t actually depend on any existing WMDs or even an existing WMD program. We believed that Saddam wanted nukes. Unless we did something immediately he’d have them 5 years after the sanctions stopped. And we couldn’t persuade the rest of the world to continue the sanctions.

Then there’s another assumption that people today forget. At the time, americans were generally agreed that we were all-powerful. We were the only superpower. Our military spending was as much as the rest of the world put together. We could do what we wanted and nobody could stop us. So the general assumption was that if we invaded and it turned out that somehow we were doing the wrong thing, iraqis might suffer from it but we wouldn’t suffer. It would be their problem. If they didn’t do what we wanted it was their own fault if they suffered the consequences.

A lot of americans were disgusted by the attitude that we had to continually pay attention to what a bunch of kibitzing weak nations wanted. What could they do if we didn’t go along with their pansy-ass ideas? Americans are dynamic people who get things done, and a lot of us thought it was time to throw our weight around and get things done. It wasn’t just iraq, we were getting sick and tired of the whole arab problem. We’d take iraq first, and then we’d use that as a base to take iran and syria, and we’d liberate lebanon, and egypt would do whatever we wanted, and if libya didn’t go along we’d just take them real quick, and we’d clean up the whole region. Throw out the unrepresentative governments and set up liberal democracies, and if the arabs didn’t like it we’d just educate them until they did like it.

And if they kept making trouble for us we could just bomb them. Green glass from arabia to pakistan. Serve them right. And anyway don’t we deserve some rewards for being strong? We were the ones who made the sacrifices that defeated the USSR. The europeans tried to appease them, and if it wasn’t for us they’d be part of russia now. They owe us bigtime.

I didn’t hear responsible people talk this way, but I heard it a lot from people who didn’t have to watch what they said. Likely a lot of people who couldn’t talk openly like that still believed it. We had the power, we could do whatever we wanted, and it was time to settle the arab question. Arabs did 9/11 and until we cleaned up the arabs and the muslims they’d keep doing it.

And remember, right after the successful invasion Cheney and Rumsfeld came out and warned syria and iran that they were next. This isn’t something you do to an enemy that can make meaningful preparations. You don’t give them 2 years warning that you’re going to invade. You threaten weak enemies who’re so intimidated they’ll make big concessions now and keep making concessions as delaying actions until they’re obviously too weak to stop you at all.

At the time it looked like we couldn’t lose. People who objected did it on the grounds that it wasn’t right. It was possible to claim that we’d get in trouble—I made that claim myself—but I couldn’t get a hearing for it. Everybody knew that we were the Hegemon, that what right or wrong, for good or evil, what we decided was what would happen.

And that’s a lot of why it’s hard to pin it on Bush. A whole lot of americans were dead wrong about it, and they don’t like to be reminded. Even worse, they liked it a lot better back in 2003 when we were on top of the world. They want those days to come back. They don’t want a dose of modern reality, they want the fantasy to be real. If you tell them we’re losing they think you’re a traitor. And in a way you are. A lot of these people will be able to say on their dying day “I have been true to the dream.”. If you tell them it isn’t true, they’ll get the idea you don’t want it to be true. And why should they listen to somebody like that?

Yes.