Hilzoy and Cheryl Rofer make two very good points very quickly:
This was not a hard thought at the time:
Since it was so much in the Bush administration's interest that they find evidence of Iraqi WMD programs, they were presumably passing all relevant intel to the inspectors. But the inspectors were finding nothing. https://t.co/kyOwsDh2pN
— hilzoy (@hilzoy) March 20, 2023
It always is quite valuable to see where there is a lack of information from the people who are most motivated to find information lies.
NotMax
Scott Ritter volubly shouted into the wilderness at the time, IIRC.
Joey Maloney
I don’t think that last sentence quite parses. But “lies” works in either of its meanings.
p.a.
Our best and brightest:
Absence of evidence is evidence of subterfuge. QED
schrodingers_cat
I was a lowly international student at that time and even I figured it out and so did the South African guy who worked in the same lab as me. The American student however was gung ho. So was my yoga teacher and my lesbian neighbor. The fervor to go to war was quite high and not just among the punditry and RWNJs and Bush II officials.
Michael Bersin
I’ve been right about things political (national, geopolitical) and the consequences of policy for at least the last twenty years. And yet I still can’t get a six or seven figure gig pontificating on a cable news show. I do have a face for radio and voice for print.
My prognostications about Arizona basketball, however, have sadly been the opposite.
Brit in Chicago
@schrodingers_cat: Really? I’m surprised. It seemed obvious to me at the time (I even went to a protest): the intelligence showed Sadam probably had WMDs*because the higher echelons of the Bush administration was making it clear to the intell community that that was the result that they wanted (demanded). Talk about incentives. Maybe my being from the UK has something to do with it, but even back in 2003 I’d been in this country a long time.
*WMDs is a stupid and deceptive concept.You suspect poison gas, you say “WMD!” and everyone thinks “Nukes, better invade”. Sadam’s having poison gas would not have been a threat to the US.
NotMax
@schrodingers_cat
OT.
Art-related topic which you might find somewhat intriguing downstairs.
Same friend’s review of a more traditional medium.
schrodingers_cat
@Brit in Chicago: Most non-Americans could see it and see through Collin Powell’s UN presentation but many Americans just couldn’t. People were still processing 9/11 and not thinking that rationally. Yes there were protestors but most normies were for the war at least initially, if you look at the opinion polls from that era. And my anecdata definitely supports it. The only Americans against the war in my friend group were the ones on the far left, who had voted for Nader in 2000.
Even John Cole was an early cheerleader of the war.
MomSense
@NotMax:
I remember that even The Financial Times was running articles saying the claims were nonsense. Some of the chemical weapons the Bush Admin were fearmongering about have a shelf life. They wouldn’t have been deadly anymore.
It was like an open secret that the whole thing was bogus and the coalition of the willing decided to do it anyway.
schrodingers_cat
@NotMax: I am not familiar with any of the software. I have used soft pastels though by no means am I an expert in their use.
MomSense
@schrodingers_cat:
I was in a bubble of anti-war friends and community. My church was unanimously opposed. Outside my bubble was not a friendly place. The media and pols were saying things like if you aren’t for us you are with the terrorists. Madness.
CindyH
@Brit in Chicago: I’m also surprised – protests all over where I lived at the time and everyone I knew saw through the lies and were shocked that Powell lied like he did
I guess Durham NC has better normies.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@schrodingers_cat: I wasn’t for the war, but I wasn’t against it either. Because 911 had just happened and because there were those in the government who had been screaming about the risk of terrorism, I was more willing to believe that the people who were screaming about Sadam might be right. However, the fact that inspectors weren’t finding anything disturbed me. So, I didn’t know what to think, but hoped that the right decisions were being made. They weren’t of course.
BenCisco 🇺🇸🎖️🖥️♦️
Art imitating life, except in real life we never learn until it’s too late.
lowtechcyclist
@Brit in Chicago:
Exactly. Their use of ‘WMDs’ at the time was an obviously deliberate conflation of a canister of mustard gas with the nuclear weapons that we knew Saddam didn’t have.
And then, of course, the inspectors found nothing.
The attempts to elide ‘there are AQ operating in Iraq’ with ‘Saddam and AQ are in bed together’ were obviously bullshit at the time.
And call me a Hobbesian, but it seemed clear to me at the time that Iraq under Saddam, as horrible as he was, was likely to be a better place for most Iraqis than the chaos that was likely in a post-Saddam Iraq.
Jackie
@schrodingers_cat: I discovered Balloon-Juice just before the war actually started. I was trying to find “rational” explanations for Bush’s determination to invade a country who hadn’t attacked us. WMD never were found in Iraq.
So I started lurking here 20 yrs ago!
PJ
@schrodingers_cat: I don’t know where you were, but I was no leftist, just a regular East Coast Democrat (still am), and I didn’t personally know anyone who was in favor of the war. Most of the Democrats in the House were against it. But the Republicans and media were creaming in their pants at the thought of it, and there were a ton of people in the country who wanted to see Arabs, regardless of whether they had anything to do with 9/11, “suck on this”, in the words of cheerleader Tom Friedman.
JCJ
@Brit in Chicago: I was always annoyed by the statement that Saddam had used poison gas against his own people. I seriously doubt that Saddam Hussein, a Sunni Arab, considered Kurds his “own people”. True, they lived within the borders of the country he ran, but by that logic the policies toward Native Americans would mean many American presidents participated in genocide against their “own people”.
oatler
In unrelated news, Kissinger is still alive.
schrodingers_cat
@PJ: I was in Maine.
lollipopguild
Bush jr needed a war, his dad had a war and he needed one too.
PJ
@Jackie: The rational explanation is that the neo-cons had a whole plan to establish a Pax Americana around the world, and this was the first step. It wasn’t a secret, you could see it written up on the Project for a New American Century website, which went up sometime in the Clinton Administration.
Bill K
Setting aside the lies and propaganda that got us into Iraq, the other BIG problem with invading Iraq was that WE WERE ALREADY INVOLVED IN A WAR! It was taking enormous resources to pursue the war in Afghanistan, but somehow everyone was just peachy about opening another front. I was serving in the Army at that time and I was constantly having to manage dividing resources between the two. I would get flak from Iraq and Afghanistan about depriving them of full support. A major factor IMO in the failure in both countries was that we were splitting resources between them.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@oatler: Heaven won’t take him and hell’s got a long waiting list.
PJ
@schrodingers_cat: Maine’s a pretty conservative place. I was there last summer, and saw plenty of signs for TFG, and even drove by a boat parade in his honor.
Anyway
My lunch group had vociferous debates in the lead-up to the war. The Rush-listening GenXers were gung-ho about the war, the slightly older guys (the whole group was WMs) were skeptical to anti-. The group had a great working chemistry and were comfortable loudly disagreeing with each other. I was the noob in the group and surprised at how openly political issues were discussed .
After the Iraq invasion the lunch discussions petered out and people started avoiding bringing up political topics. Even the lunch group splintered and it was just different after that.
Anyway
@PJ:
And the neo-cons mounted a strong PR-media campaign. Bill Kristol should be on every TV show today having to defend all his sunny comments pushing for the war.
CaseyL
I remember that era very well: the obvious lies, the massive protests, and the feeling that facts did not matter because it was obvious the Bush Admin wanted the war, the MSM wanted the war, and too many ordinary people wanted the war.
Colin Powell’s presentation at the UN is supposed to have swayed some General Assembly votes in favor, but I’m not sure how much a Yes vote from the UN was already baked in, versus how much of it was aimed at public opinion, e.g., “…even Colin Powell says there are WMDs in Iraq.”
It was a clear cut case of seeing mass hysteria deliberately fed to over-ride everything else, in real time, on all channels. Infuriating and despair-making.
Another Scott
I think there were a few things going on:
At the time, as I recall, I figured W and the rest were exaggerating and simplifying, and shading the truth. And Saddam wasn’t doing himself any favors by not following the rules about inspections. (And when he had gotten rid of his chemical weapons years/decades before, he dumped them in a pit rather than actually having people witness what he was doing to have some confidence in what he later said about it.) I had grave misgivings about it, but it wasn’t obvious to me that they were making things up out of whole cloth.
Powell’s speech at the UN was a disaster for trying to convince people that the US was right. Conflating things from decades earlier with what was happening now, etc. It wouldn’t convince anyone who was wondering and was thinking clearly.
I’ve subsequently taken dquaredigest’s (Dan Davies’) “One Minute MBA” rules to heart (repost):
It was a teachable moment. A few of us, me at least, learned from it.
The press and the media companies, of course, has no interest in learning that gets in the way of ever increasing profits. The truth doesn’t matter. What matters is “engagement”…
Grr…,
Scott.
oatler
@Bruce K in ATH-GR:
Could be a country song!
Baud
Seems to me that the biggest tragedy is that Bush’s strategy worked. The threat of war got Saddam to grant concessions. But Bush and his team didn’t care because they wanted the war.
NotMax
@CaseyL
Cry yellowcake and let loose the dogs of war.
tybee
@NotMax:
exactly my recollection as well. i remember screaming at the television as Boy George sent us into an unnecessary war.
Poe Larity
4 in 5 Americans will believe whatever they hear and not much has changed.
Rusty
I recall reports of anonymous boasting from the Bush administration to the effect “girls want to go to Afghanistan, women want to go to Iraq, but MEN want to go to Iran!”. I supported the invasion of Afghanistan, the country was harboring and supporting groups that were attacking the US. I was against the invasion of Iraq, even then the “evidence” was amazingly flimsy, and I was deeply worried we were going to go on an invasion spree and put the entire middle east to flames.
Brit in Chicago
@lollipopguild: And a bigger and better war too! (By “better” I mean vastly, disatrously, worse.)
rmjohnston
The one thing that the Iraq war accomplished and was clearly something that would have been known ahead of time was to strengthen the position of Iran vis-à-vis Iraq. The fact that that probably wasn’t the reason for the invasion is a failure of Occam’s razor and is actually a little scary.
matt
The inspectors point is what caused me to reject the notion that Gore would have invaded. He would have been constrained by the inspectors finding nothing, instead of what Bush did.
matt
@Poe Larity: My normie liberal mom was convinced by Colin Powell and thought my arguments about the transparent fictionality of his claims were conspiracy theories.
Soprano2
@schrodingers_cat: My husband says people had bloodlust after 9-11 and there weren’t any good targets in Afghanistan, so that’s why so many were for the Iraq War and Occupation. They were hurting, and wanted some country they think might have been responsible to hurt too. I kept saying “But Iraq didn’t attack us” and “You do know Bush wanted to invade Iraq before 9-11, he’s just using this as a pretext” and “Where is the proof he has WMD? I haven’t seen any”, but of course I’m a nobody. It was easy to see through if you didn’t have bloodlust in your eyes.
schrodingers_cat
@PJ: Maine has gotten redder since the early aughts. IIRC both Gore and Kerry won ME’s electoral votes.
Professor Bigfoot
@schrodingers_cat: I was the Black engineer among all the white engineers who said unequivocally that it was BS; and they essentially shouted me down (as white men are wont to do.)
I sometimes wonder if those shitheads ever acknowledged their error. Unlikely; as almost certainly every single one of ’em is a Trumper today.
Soprano2
@PJ: Oh yeah, that’s been disappeared from a lot of the history of this. They thought they were going to install Chalibi as ruler of Iraq, he would recognize Israel, and like dominoes the rest of the countries in the Middle East would follow suit because they were afraid of us invading them too. It was crazy, but it’s what they thought would happen. Richard Clarke said in his book that they were talking about invading Iraq almost as soon as W. took office!
Ohio Mom
@schrodingers_cat: I didn’t know Balloon Juice existed back then. I was a regular Atrios reader and he was dead set against the Iraq war.
Clearly, some Americans were against the war, there were (underreported) protest marches (I would have gone to one but I had a toddler who needed constant supervision and hated crowds).
I was already aghast the war in Afghanistan was still raging. I’d originally thought it would be one of those wars where we’d barge in, make a lot of noise and leave six weeks later, having thrown our weight around.
Gin & Tonic
@NotMax: He is also a convicted pedophile.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
IIRC Rumsfeld said this out loud, I’m kind of surprised, thinking back how much my memory of that time has faded. Also IIRC, Powell’s UN speech had been more or less debunked within 48 hours.
I think Powell sold his soul to Bush on this, that a lot of Dems, and probably more than one R, voted for the AUMF because they thought the serious grown-up Colin Powell would keep Junior in line and use the AUMF as a negotiating ploy to get Saddam to run out the clock in Oman or some other country willing to take him.
I do remember Bob Graham all but weeping on the Senate floor, begging his colleagues to go and read the classified intelligence, not just the summary the Bushes had sent. they had to go do a secured room (a SCIF? I didn’t know the acronym then) and sign in to see it, so it was known that only 22 Senators (I think the Pod Save Bros said in their retrospective) had actually done so.
Ohio Mom
@Baud: Oh, I’d forgotten all about that but now I can remember being at a dinner party and the host declaring that Sadam was making concessions so there would be no war.
To be fair, that did seem plausible for all of a moment.
schrodingers_cat
@Ohio Mom
Without a doubt. But they were in the minority.
BC in Illinois
I was in a position in March 2003 where I didn’t want to make waves by speaking against the war.
So when somebody asked me, point-blank, in the middle of a group, what I thought, I said, “There’s no question that we can defeat Iraq. I don’t know that we have a plan for what to do with Iraq after that.” I don’t remember anyone asking me much after that. Month by month I became more and more correct.
Anyway
“revisiting PR campaign for selling the Iraq invasion “. There was never any decision-making. Remember the CIA had its arm twisted to support the conclusions that Rummy and Cheney wanted. Another name from that era – Hans Blix.
Frankensteinbeck
@Another Scott:
Mr. Musk to the white courtesy phone.
And their personal prejudices. I will give two powerful pieces of evidence. First, there is no story more boring than ‘but her emails’. It is dry. It is technical. Nothing happened for months on end. It had two newsworthy moments, when Comey decided he hated Hillary enough to make misleading public statements. Otherwise it was the opposite of clickbait. The story existed solely because news people wanted it to exist, and dragged it on and on, because they hated Hillary. The second is ebola. Ebola is great clickbait. It utterly disappeared as a story after the election, but no change had happened in the story itself. It was still prime clickbait. News people decided that it wasn’t as important to be as scared of brown people for some reason.
MomSense
@schrodingers_cat:
Those of us against the war in Iraq were in the minority, but until the 2017 women’s march, they were the largest global protests in history.
Protests alone don’t cause legislative or policy changes however. They build morale and get attention that you can build on to organize.
Anyway
For all you FTFNYT readers – any mea culpas from The Mustache? or Judith Miller?
RaflW
At the time this was all going down, I remember basically screaming as I listened to NPR about Has Blix being pulled out of Iraq. It was obvious to me (and to a few reporters like David Corn) that he was being yanked because he wasn’t finding anything.
It was g.d. apparent. But 95% of the press was swept up in Judith Miller-level bullshit, and I really think, their own personal wish to see someone ‘pay’ for 9/11. The people who should have been pushing back on the nonsense idea that a nation that sent none of the hijackers and didn’t fund bin Laden (and golly, looking back and seeing the CIA + Saudi money flow to fight Russia in the 80s would have been painful questions!) was a valid front in response to 9/11.
Another Scott
Speaking of known liars, … Nature on GPT-4:
Plus, they let it lie (like the example of ChatGPT lying and paying humans to solve Captchas).
Caveat emptor.
Cheers,
Scott.
eversor
I joined the Navy in 2000. And almost immediately out of my A and C schools went directly to the fleet. Our carrier group had already gone through their spin ups so we immediately went to the Persian Gulf. This is prior to 9/11. We were enforcing no fly zones, maritime interdiction, and other stuff which does involve blowing shit up and killing people. The first Gulf War never fully and truly “ended”. At least in the sense that every goes home and hostilities are over. That’s the thinig about these things. There are dozens of “hot” areas all over the world that people at home don’t know about because it’s not major news.
There was always talk about how the situation was not maintainable. Eventually something was going to break. Jets downed, ship taken out, whatever. The point is the higherups were always convinced that this could not be sustained and eventually we’d all be going back to Iraq. This was the common wisdom. It was preordained before 9/11 happened on yes “both sides” and all the smart crowd. But it wasn’t in the public eye.
When 9/11 happened I was in a shore based center and everyone just assumed at that instant it was back to Iraq.
None of this excuses the Bush administration. Their lies and bullshit about this was to sell it. But I don’t think it had to be sold really. It was just cover for a ton of people who either wanted to do it, thought we had to do it, or thought it was going to happen regardless and they all got inline on this.
I didn’t support it really I was just sort of meh about the whole thing and realized there was nothing I could do about it and I was in uniform so sailor up! But you can’t talk about Iraq II without talking about the aftermath of Iraq I. And if you start talking about it begs the question of all the other shit we are doing all over the place that may or may not be a ticking time bomb and who is chomping at the bit over those issues. And if you know the scope of what we are up to, that’s fucking terrifying.
Gin & Tonic
deleted
mvr
It was the dawning of reality on someone who had been a cheerleader that brought many of us skeptics over here for comfort and solidarity.
But I think that “We were all mistaken” talk masks the fact that there was a lot of skepticism in the US. I recall going to demonstrations, and no one I knew was convinced by the Colin Powell speech. Talk of “weapons of mass destruction” is designed to blur distinctions between nuclear warheads and smaller lethal but not nearly as lethal weapons, and a lot of the discussion at the time turned on such blurring.
What does tend to happen in this country is that once war is declared a good part of the citizenry goes all in, whatever the evidence was at the time. And that definitely happened w the second Iraq war. (It also happened with the first, iirc.)
sab
@CindyH: Ditto Akron Ohio.
Poe Larity
@rmjohnston:
– Dick Cheney, 1994
Iraq makes perfect sense if you assume Dick was turned to an Iranian asset.
https://www.salon.com/2014/07/19/when_dick_cheney_told_the_truth_about_iraq_partner/
Another Scott
@eversor:
+1
We were spending something like $1B a month blowing up Saddam’s anti-aircraft radars and the like. It didn’t seem like the situation was sustainable.
Of course, when you have a mouse infestation in your attic, the solution isn’t to set your attic on fire with gasoline…
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
sab
@sab: My step–sons’ best friends, still in high school had pre-enlisted in the Army because that is how working class kids pay for college. They had not expected that they were signing on for a war, and yet off they went. Their parents were proud, but their friends were all horrified.
MisterForkbeard
I was young and had just started college, and I remember having lots of late-night talks about this with my friends in the dorm lobby (as college kids do).
Very few people in my group (which was a fairly liberal but not politically active group) thought that Bush was straight up lying. A few thought the war was definitely justified or that we were going to go lance a long-standing problem. My own thought was that the whole thing seemed really sketchy and the risks were huge, but I had a hard time believing the Bush would just make stuff up, so I wasn’t protesting and screaming about it.
It was obvious at a certain point that Bush was just going to declare war regardless of the actual steps and warnings he was taking (ex: weapons inspector reports). And yet, I still wasn’t ready to decide it was malfeasance because I honestly had thought that level of lying wasn’t something we did anymore as a country.
Now I know it’s something that Dems don’t do, but Republicans have decided they get a lot of political mileage out of it.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@schrodingers_cat:
Maine went blue in 2018 and 2022 in state elections though
Betty Cracker
During the run up to the Iraq War, my husband and I watched the coverage in disbelief since we could see it was all based on corrupt intent and misplaced anger. It was horrifying to watch the country sleepwalk into it, led by liars and gross influence peddlers. But ours was definitely not the majority opinion at the time, even among friends who were staunch Democrats. It caused a lot of hard feelings.
It still makes me angry to think of it. So much death and destruction and waste for no good reason. It’s infuriating that no one was held accountable, not just criminally but even by something far more minor like professional shame. I think that’s one of the reasons we find ourselves in our current predicament. There’s so little accountability for powerful people.
Lapassionara
I recall watching an interview with a prominent Israeli just before Iraq II. During the first Iraq war, the US had prevailed on Israel to just sit and watch Iraq lob Scud missiles into its territory, without responding. This was one key to the success of the US in the first Iraq war. If Israel had responded, as I am sure it wanted to do, the conflict would have gotten much bigger and possibly out of control.
Anyway, during this interview, the Israeli was asked if he was concerned about Iraq lobbing missiles into Israel if the US invaded. He said something to the effect of “no, we are not concerned. Iraq does not have the ability to send missiles our way.”
I was astonished, and I sat there yelling at the TV. If Israel was not concerned about Iraq, why did we think it posed a threat?
So many lies, so much sorrow and suffering.
schrodingers_cat
Even after W fucked up royally the media in this country continued its Republican fluffing and the majority white electorate of this country continued voting for the Rs in successive elections. It did not change when an obviously incompetent disaster like the Orange One won the 2016 R nomination. So I don’t think the people who should have learned something, did
ETA: Yes, some people changed their political views and became Ds or independents, bloghost included. But not enough.
PaulB
It’s not the first time. Back in the 70s, the CIA commissioned a “Team B” to reassess the threat from the Soviet Union. The claim at the time was that the CIA had been consistently underestimating the military threat.
Among other things, Team B decided that the Soviet Union had an extremely advanced submarine capability. The evidence for this was that there was no evidence of such a submarine because, of course, it was too advanced.
The Team B reports were responsible for a massive arms buildup that began toward the end of the Carter administration and accelerated under Reagan. Future events showed that Team B basically got everything wrong.
PJ
@Betty Cracker: GWB, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, et al., never lost a wink of sleep over the death, destruction, and torture they caused or advocated, and never will. Nor do they care about the destruction of American power, hard and soft, they caused around the world, and the foundation they laid for their party achieving and maintaining power based on lies. (Of course, that started with Nixon and blossomed with Reagan.)
eversor
@Another Scott:
Agree the solution was dumber than all hell. But the situation was still stupid and couldn’t work.
The situation with NK “works”. As batshit as NK is and as huge of a problem it is we are not involved in active combat with them. Nobody is taking shots at each other. So the sanctions “work”. By which I mean they can be enforced. Who they actually hurt, if they actually hold NK back, what would happen if they were dropped is all up for debate. I’d say do what SK wants in this area.
Thing is NK is, in it’s own odd way, an easier issue than various parts of the ME. As I’ve stated before I spent the end of my time working for a two star admiral so I got to see the strategic crap of everything in multiple places. All these problems are complex and should be treated with care, but some of them are religious, ethnic, tribal, and other stuff and vastly more chaotic tinderboxes with far more fuel than others.
It’s always funny to hear “we have to do something what we are doing can’t go on forever eventually this will blow up in our face” and then they can’t explain what “something” is. OK genius you tell me, and I am fucking positive that what you come up with will be dumber than what we are doing.
Glad I’m out of that whole line of work.
PaulB
One of the things that stood out for me at the time was the marginalization of those who were later proved to be correct about pretty much everything. Even worse, this marginalization continued even after it was proved that they were correct. And all of the people who got Iraq wrong were still consulted, still in the news, still showcased on various news programs, still taken seriously.
Enormously frustrating.
Edited to add that I was particularly pissed off about the reception to Powell’s speech. That was debunked in real time on various websites, and by various experts, all of whom pointed out that he was full of shit. The newspapers and media organizations the next day, though, reported none of that.
Dorothy A. Winsor
OT but on our minds:
Anyway
Cheney and Dubya and Condi are still around – they should all be doing 20th anniversary retrospectives — FSM forbid Rethug elites are asked any questions about their decisions …
opiejeanne
@tybee: I was living in the SF Bay area, dropped off something at a friend’s house. She had her tv on mid-day (an unusual practice for her), watching the news that the war with Iraq was starting. She told me she couldn’t wait for the US to get even for 9/11. She was a very liberal Democrat, I was still nominally* a Republican, and I couldn’t believe that she had bought W’s arguments for the war. We didn’t argue, I just reminded her that Iraq had had nothing to do with 9/11, and she was stunned because she knew it and had pushed that bit of knowledge aside.
*I had been voting for Democrats for nearly everything for several years by then because I saw that insane Republicans were becoming the choice/voice of the party, and it became obvious to me when Reagan ran for president. California was becoming a mess thanks to the R majority in Sacramento.
eversor
@schrodingers_cat:
The white majority did because Jesus. Bush won his second term of the issue of gay people and evolution. Trump, and the current issues are all straight Christian Nationalism.
lowtechcyclist
@lollipopguild:
AND he needed to one-up his dad, who stopped short of invading Iraq after liberating Kuwait from Saddam.
Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis paid for GWB’s daddy issues.
Mai Naem mobile
I remember a client and her husband just going apoplectic over W’s decision. Just going on and on about W being a war monger and how this was a huge mistake. They were in their 60s so had gone through Vietnam as adults. I didn’t think W was outright lying but I also thought it was going to be quickie war like Daddy Bush’s where the defense contractors make a killing financially. It never occurred to me that these people were going to be so utterly incompetent.
Citizen Alan
@schrodingers_cat: There was never one second when I believed in the Iraq War. I initially supported the Afghanistan war because I thought we could do so lasting good there. That if we took over the country, cleaned out Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and instituted what would basically be a 10- to 20-year Marshall Plan for Afghanistan and fully committed ourselves to dragging that nation into the 21st century, that it might possibly be a net positive. Then, six months into the invasion, Dubya took halve the personnel and resources that had been allocated to Afghanistan and diverted them to Iraq because “Saddam Hussein trah’d ta kill mah daddy!” (/Shrub drawl). And I knew at once it was a lost cause.
Citizen Alan
@oatler: He and Cheney will live forever. They did some Satanic ritual fueled by the untold millions of gallons of blood they both spilled.
Citizen Alan
@lollipopguild: Worse than that. Junior learned the wrong lesson from Senior’s war: Don’t end it too soon or people will forget to be patriotic at election time. Drag that fucker out for decades.
Earl
The real plan was to conquer Iraq and use their ground troops to attack Iran.
jonas
@MisterForkbeard:
The same here. I just couldn’t wrap my head around the idea that elected leaders would actually take the country to war over wholly manufactured evidence. They would destroy themselves and their party for a generation or more, I figured. Who would risk that, not to mention the blood and treasure involved? Bush and Cheney, that’s who, I guess. And then they got re-elected, even after the Abu Ghraib scandal and Bin Laden was still at large and it was clear everything was going pear-shaped in Iraq. By 2008, both the economy and the disaster in Iraq had gotten so bad that Bush left office in shame and ignominy — for a while — to go paint. Then in 2016 we elect an even stupider and more reckless Republican whose whole *brand* is brazen lying, ffs.
That’s not a political education I would wish on anyone.
Baud
Moved to new open thread.
Gvg
@schrodingers_cat: my gun rights Vietnam vet uncle thought Iraq was a bad move at the time. And I am pretty sure voted against Bush fro reelection even though he has never actually said Vietnam was a mistake. This is a guy who still has trauma from then and says he would be in jail or homeless if not for his wife afterwards….no plenty of people were against it, they just were sane and rational not fierce and nuts. Nor did they have a megaphone to be heard or proof they were right. It was kind of a negative proof. You are all making a big fuss over nothing is not a good rallying cry nor is it easy to prove I guess.
sdhays
I think support for the war was extraordinarily weak considering how all-in just about all of the political and media elites were in their support of the war and W in particular. MSNBC fired their top rated talk show host for publicly questioning the invasion. Dick Cheney was laundering lies through the FTFNYT. The media would not acknowledge the massive protests – they just ignored them and didn’t talk about them. They just laughed off Gore like they did in 2000. The entire elite of the country was either sold on invasion or totally cowed against offering any kind of opposition. And yet support was between 50 and 60% on the eve of the invasion.
This was the primary reason I was pretty upset with Hillary Clinton in 2008. I saw her support for the AUMF as a cowardly act and a failure of leadership. I saw her as the most influential representative of the Clinton wing of the party which was still ascendant, and if she had opposed the AUMF, others would have followed.
Gore was really the only elite Democrat who covered himself in any glory, as I recall. He burned a lot of bridges because he concluded he would always regret not doing everything he could to prevent the war. Bob Graham is also worth noting, doomed to be remembered as a Cassandra screaming in the dark.
Soprano2
@Citizen Alan: Also don’t forget, that diversion of funds was illegal, but nothing was ever done about it. So much criminal stuff happened around the Iraq War and Occupation that no one ever paid a price for.
PJ
@eversor: Early in 2000, I told a friend there was no way a majority of this country was going to elect an obvious moron like GWB. “Nah,” he replied, “The Republicans are going to win, and it’s going to be because of gay marriage. They’re going to hammer that every chance they get.”
And he was right. Gay marriage was the Woke, CRT, DEI, Trans boogeyman of the late ‘90s and early ‘00s.
E.
I for one cannot wait for all the similar statements we will get to utter, begging forgiveness, for failing to see what is right in front of us regarding climate change.
Amir Khalid
@Betty Cracker:
The bullshit being slung by the W administration to justify the Iraq invasion was painfully obvious to most of the world. Two decades on, I still recall Colin Powell making a fool of himself at that Security Council meeting with those flimsy claims about Iraqi WMDs.
Omnes Omnibus
I was opposed to the Iraq invasion from the start. The WMD arguments never added up and the attempt to tie Iraq into a 9/11 response was idiotic. I had supported Afghanistan, but lost faith in the efforts there as I saw the needed resource being channeled to Iraq. I was living in Ohio at the time, and opposing the invasion came with negative social consequences. Weirdly, people assumed that because I had been a soldier l would support it. The opposite was true. I don’t believe in wasting soldiers’ lives unless there is good cause. There wasn’t.
PJ
@sdhays: Robert Byrd gave a very passionate, desperate speech in the Senate against the war.
Betty Cracker
@sdhays: I also held that vote against Clinton in the 2008 primary, but it looks like Obama is destined to be the only Democrat who benefited from being right about the Iraq War, and he wasn’t even in a position to take an important vote on it.
As the ranking foreign relations committee member, Biden was far more gung-ho about selling the Iraq invasion than Clinton was, and no one seemed to care later. I can’t decide if that’s due to the passage of time, sexism or a combination of the two.
schrodingers_cat
@Betty Cracker: IIRC Biden wanted to partition Iraq. A terrible idea IMHO. Biden’s time as VP made him a much better presidential candidate and a better president.
MisterForkbeard
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I literally read a QAnon nut this morning talking about how these were actually for arresting Biden and the crowds that would show up. Yeesh.
But it does seem like we’re getting witness tampering and fraud indictments out of this, so…
Kelly
The run up to Iraq 2 was the only time I’ve yelled at the TV. The justifications were so clearly bullshit. Hells bells it hadn’t been that long since Bush 1 declined to take over Iraq at least partially because he knew an occupation would turn out like it did for his idiot son,
Gvg
@Soprano2: we would not even have been paying much attention to Iraq if Bush and associates had not worked HARD to direct out attention there first.
I am not sure we could have done better in Afghanistan than we did. Others have failed before and it is organized differently than we are used to per Adam, but I am sure it was doomed when we split our attention and went after Iraq too at the same time. Curse Bush. Of course he is such a mental midget along with his crew that they never picked good enough people to have a chance in Afghanistan but some other President maybe could have. And Afghanistan had actually harbored our attackers. We did have to attack them in some way.
and Bush did not even take them seriously enough the disrespectful scum.
MisterForkbeard
@jonas: It was and is amazing.
I knew Bush lied (he did it ALL THE TIME during the election campaign and during his presidency) but I didn’t believe he’d lie us into a war that would kill a ton of people. Despite me pointing out in my High School government class that I wouldn’t join the military because I thought Bush was start a specious war and I didn’t want to be part of that.
But what Republicans learned is that if you lie, the media backs you up and takes at least 4 years to backtrack. And that was only after literally years and years of open evidence and incompetence. And then they gave Romney, McCain, and Trump the benefit of the doubt and we all saw how that turned out.
Citizen Alan
@Betty Cracker: I am a firm believer in “Goldstein’s Theory of Modern Warfare” from 1984, which asserts that the true purpose of modern warfare is nothing more or less than to simply and deliberately waste the nation’s productive output so that there won’t be pressure to expend those resources on improving the lives of the common people … because that might make them less valuable as workers.
It still astounds me that when Bill Clinton left office, we were running a budget surplus and were projected to literally pay-off the National Debt by 2010 or so. But then, Bush started two wars while simultaneously enacting what was, IIRC, the biggest tax cut in history, which ran up huge deficits that temporarily scuttled all talk about universal healthcare for years.
Gvg
@mvr: I knew someone on a sports message board back then whose son was killed in Iraq. After that he was unable to accept anyone or any idea that it had been a mistake to go because then his son’s death would have been “meaningless”. I could understand but did not agree and I have known others who reacted differently but it is a fact that there is a kind of emotional sunk cost that sticks. I think it’s why it took 20 years to get out. That and memories of Vietnam and the political weaponization of that withdrawal.
Mai Naem mobile
@Betty Cracker: I am sure sexism was part of it but by the time Biden became the veep candidate the economy was in free fall. The war wasn’t anywhere as important as the economy. I actually give Hillary more of a pass since 9/11 was primarily in NY and the war was supposedly some retribution for that.
dnfree
I and most moderately liberal people I know were against the Iraq War for multiple reasons. For one thing, we doubted the evidence since the inspectors were not finding any support for the allegations. For another, we did not think the United States should engage in pre-emptive strikes, at least not unless there was far more evidence that what was presented. For a third, we were very suspicious of Dick Cheney’s involvement and motivations.
The Democrats in Congress who voted for the war mostly put qualifications on their support, as far as I recall. The resolution was written in a way to give them cover, and they were shocked, shocked, to find out that the cover was just window dressing and not sincere.
ETA I remember James Fallows’ writing at the time, and the famous article “Blind into Baghdad”.
Citizen Alan
@p.a.: The GOoPers say that about everything. The fact that absolutely nothing of a criminal nature has ever been proven against Biden, Obama, or either Clinton is only further proof of what diabolical geniuses they all are.
Ruckus
Not only did they not have nukes, they didn’t have a nuke, they had no way to deliver them if they had had them. It was an insane concept.
But then I remember flying in an airliner on that day and having the pilot tell us that a plane had hit the WTC. And then another and another hit the Pentagon. It really was a rather unbelievable day.
gene108
The international community wanted weapons inspectors back in Iraq, after Saddam kicked them out.
If Bush, Jr. did not invade, after his threats caused Saddam to let weapons inspectors in, he’d probably be thought of as unorthodox but got the result most wanted.
At the end of the day, the only person who really knows why we invaded is George W. Bush, and he isn’t going to give a clear answer.
Betty Cracker
@Mai Naem mobile: It was a long time ago, but I’m pretty sure Clinton was hounded about the AUMF vote during the early days of the 2008 primary when Biden was still running for POTUS, and he didn’t catch nearly that level of flak even though he had a far more prominent role role in selling the war.
I remember a few years ago (once Biden got the nomination) hoping Trump would be too dumb to find that footage and use it in ads, and yep, he was. Or maybe it wouldn’t have mattered so many years later anyway. I don’t know.
Gvg
@Another Scott: The biggest lie W told was that the war would be cheap or even profitable, that Iraqis would welcome us. He and Cheney really emphasized that the war would not cost a lot and they shut down anyone who said otherwise and fired any generals who started coming up with elaborate expensive plans for occupation that involved lots of Americans spending years over there. In my eyes that showed that they knew they could not get approval from the public of Congress if we had a more realistic view of costs and also that they were going to fuck it up because they were too stupid to take good advice. They believed their own bullshit. I knew it would fail them, cost a LOT of money, and be a total incompetent shitshow run by cronies and rich children with no experience. They refused to believe estimates of the number of policemen needed.
Totally not like our planning for after WWII.
W benefitted by being the son of Bush I who actually ran Gulf war I and did it fast and cheaply without bogging us down, so Bush II had some credibility that he used and blew it. He really wasn’t a chip off the old block in a lot of ways.
Ruckus
@PJ:
Conservatives can often only see one path, to or from anything. I believe that they are the people who do not want to think, to have more than one opinion be valid, because more than one opinion on any issue brings them back to the fact that they may actually be wrong about something/anything and they can’t possibly be wrong in any way whatsoever. Their entire life/political concept is that life can only be one way, and any other concept is against everything they believe in, which is that they will rot in hell if they don’t belong to THE group. It’s that self fulfilling prophecy that if the leader runs off a cliff, they have to follow. I say give that jackass a kick in the butt to make sure he sails all the way down.
PJ
@Gvg: The idea that, after bombing them into submission, Iraqis would welcome us with flowers was the most insane part of that plan.
At the time, I believed that some US administration could actually conduct a successful invasion of Iraq that would eventually result in a peaceful civil society, but there was no way in hell it would happen in an administration as stupid, incompetent, and corrupt as Bush’s.
Ruckus
@gene108:
At the end of the day, the only person who really knows why we invaded is George W. Bush, and he isn’t going to give a clear answer.
I’d bet he didn’t actually know, it was just a reaction, the one his political party likes, which is “We are always right and if we aren’t we will bomb everything so there is no one left to complain.”
Soprano2
@Gvg: This, 100%, is true IMHO. The “sunk cost fallacy” is a real thing, and when the sunk cost is people’s lives it’s even harder to get out of the trap.
Chief Oshkosh
@Betty Cracker: Yep. Iraq II was a watershed event for The Deplorables and those who would rule them.
TerryC
@jonas: I’d been in Vietnam and knew about lies. It was so sad to watch this go down.
jonas
@TerryC: The lies in Vietnam were about what the stakes were, and whether we could actually win. To be fair, there was an actual communist insurgency going on. Imagine if it turned out that the Viet Kong was made up.
lowtechcyclist
George W. Bush, March 17, 2003
Time to prosecute the fuckers for the war crime of invading another country on trumped-up grounds.
Way overdue, actually – Rummy’s already in his grave. Too late to prosecute him.
JustRuss
@sab: Then of course there was the (unprecedented? Not sure) calling up the Guard and sending them to fight. By a president who ducked out of Vietnam by getting a very coveted position in the Guard.
Mai Naem mobile
@Betty Cracker: HRC was definitely hounded about the AUMF vote but I don’t believe Biden was considered a first tier candidate. Honestly I don’t remember it being anything but HRC, Obama and Sanders. Biden became significant only during the GE and the economy had taken over as top issue by then.
RaflW
@JCJ: Ronald Reagan strategically ignored a plague among white, gainfully employed middle age Americans. Because they were gay, they were clearly not “his people” (at least once he left Hollywood).
Brit in Chicago
@eversor: Maybe those issues helped, but I think he mostly won because he was “a wartime president” (his own words). Neat trick: start a war on a phony pretext and then use it to get re-elected. He also won because Katrina happened in 2005 not 2004.
Paul in KY
@PJ: It was to take out Saddam for Israel. He was paying money to families of suicide bombers and would scud them every so often.
Brit in Chicago
@schrodingers_cat: “Biden’s time as VP made him a much better presidential candidate and a better president.”
I strongly agree with this. It’s a common saying that people get more right-wing as they get older. Perhaps it is true in general, but it’s not been true in my case—I was never a Republican, but as I have experienced more and, I hope, come to understand the world better, I have moved left. I think the same is true of Uncle Joe.
Brit in Chicago
@Mai Naem mobile: “supposedly” is being asked to do too much work here.
RaflW
@Citizen Alan: I felt at the time like war in Afghanistan could be justified, but that the lesson of the Russians being in that quagmire were being ignored. (And at that time, RU forces and materiel were not corruptly siphoned at anything like the level in recent years).
I was very ambivalent about a just, but likely protracted and terrible war. Iraq II was an obvious set of ego bullshit and neocon ‘shock and awe’ (though that term would only haunt us after the boom boom became quagmire and dissipation).
RaflW
@jonas: Add to that, Bush & Rove used LGBTQ people as fucking pawns in their re-election campaign. The whole g.d. marriage amendment thing was specifically orchestrated to get Bush back over the finish line (note: old NYT link). Using and abusing us queers to stay in the war. Bah!
Same horrific playbook being run now but on an even smaller and less (widely) understood marginalized group.
Paul in KY
@matt: Pres. Gore probably would have gotten the drop on Osama and thus no 911.
mvr
@Gvg: That makes sense. I hadn’t really thought about this in terms of sunk costs because my memory says that public opinion changed right near the beginning. But it might well be a good explanation of why it went on so long.
I don’t know if this is a kind of sunk cost reasoning really, but even I had the reaction that once we’ve really messed things up at the great expense to other innocent people, we have some obligation to fix things. But that seems to have been impossible.
Paul in KY
@Soprano2: Motherfucking Osama Bin Laden was in Afganistan and that was enough for me!!! Not cursing at you, but at those who thought there weren’t ‘enough’ targets.
Paul in KY
@Anyway: Michael Kelly was killed in Iraq and that was good.
Paul in KY
@RaflW: The press all wanted to be ‘war correspondents’ like Murrow and Pyle and wear cool clothes and shit like that.
Paul in KY
@Citizen Alan: That’s sure what Cheney and Batshit McChimpy did. Part of the ‘Starve the Beast’ BS.
Paul in KY
@JustRuss: And then going AWOL from that! Golden Rule: Those with the gold make the rules.
PJ
@Mai Naem mobile: Bernie Sanders did not run for President in 2008 – he had only been elected to the Senate for the first time in 2006.
dimmsdale
No blog post remembering the Iraq War would be complete without referencing this 2006 post from John Rogers; in it he captures the flavor of the conservative pro-war ethos that propelled our “opinion makers”, and also some of the revolting macho posturing they exhibited (they weren’t called the 101st Keyboard Kommandos” for nothing). It’s a brilliant piece of writing that calls them out and definitively dismembers their arguments. Enjoy (if that’s the word to describe it).
http://kfmonkey.blogspot.com/2006/05/lions-led-by-donkeys.html
PS, I remember watching in horror at the time as the pro-war cheerleaders cheapened, degraded, and perverted our governing institutions in service of their dreams of glory. They (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice and the rest) were dimestore pikers next to the Trump grift-a-thon, but very much of the same stripe, and very much showed the Trumpies how much can be gotten away with, when consequences are nonexistent.
Citizen Alan
@Paul in KY: I will go to my grave convinced that not only would President Gore have prevented 9/11, the GOP would have literally mocked the idea that something like 9/11 could have ever happened.
Citizen Alan
@Paul in KY: Then we should have ended him at Tora Bora instead. But we didn’t because the GOP needed a boogie man
Paul in KY
@Citizen Alan: Oh yeah. Evidence be damned.
Paul in KY
@Citizen Alan: I sure wish we would have. Although I would have wanted him taken alive to be tried and hanged.
dibert dogbert
@Brit in Chicago: NBC back in my day. Nuclear, Biological and Chemical.
lowtechcyclist
@Citizen Alan:
The thing that really griped me was GWB saying in March 2002 that bin Laden didn’t concern him anymore. WTF, dude! This guy killed 3000 Americans.
I spent years quoting Bogie’s soliloquy at the end of Maltese Falcon:
And when you’re the President of the United States, and someone kills three thousand Americans, you’re supposed to do something about it. It’s bad business to let the killer get away with it, bad all around, bad for every American, everywhere.
But GWB didn’t care. He had other fish to fry.
lowtechcyclist
@Citizen Alan:
Ditto. First of all, Gore would not have ignored the sequence of increasingly hair-on-fire PDBs about bin Laden’s plans to attack America. z(The infamous 8/6/2001 PDB was something like the sixth in that sequence. Bush ignored them because non-state terrorism was Clinton’s thing.)
And second, the approach he used to respond to the Millennium Plot (everybody’s long since forgotten about that) would have been perfect for finding out what was going on when reports started coming in about weirdos who wanted to learn to fly planes but not land them.
If not for the motherfucking Butterfly Ballot*, the Twin Towers would still be standing.
*For 22 years, I’ve though that chaos theory’s ‘Butterfly Effect’ needed to be renamed the ‘Butterfly Ballot Effect.’ We’d be in a very different world if Palm Beach County had gone with a less confusing ballot layout.
kalakal
I was in the UK at the time and being fucking appalled as soon as Shrub jr mentioned Iraq. The sodding ‘Axis of Evil’ was an instant tell that it was BS. Iraq, Iran, and NK cooperating? FFS! Iran & Iraq hated each other and were in a state of cold/luke warm war. NK had nothing to do with either. Hussein had always had a down on terrorist groups that he didn’t fully control.
The initial actions in Afghanistan I could understand a certain logic to, espescially as it was very low commitment by the US. Strategic air power and local forces, backed up by special forces to overthrow the hideous and unpopular Taliban regime then presumably get Bin Laden.
Suddenly Shrub announces the real target is Hussein and Iraq, an admittedly horrible individual and regime but one that quite obviously had sod all to do with 9/11 and Al-Quaeda. It was obvious from that point onwards there was no plan for what happened after the invasion and that there was going to be a complete destabilization of the mid east.
I never doubted for a second that the US & UK would stomp the Iraqi military flat within days. I always never doubted that they were going to be stuck there after hated by all sides with no good exit.
The only silver lining I took to Shrubs reelection in 2004 is Jr and the repubs were going to get the blame for the coming mess. Had Kerry won the narrative would have been how Kerry fucked up Jrs superb military success