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THE IRAQ WAR’S INTELLIGENCE FAILURES ARE STILL MISUNDERSTOOD

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rangerrebew:
THE IRAQ WAR’S INTELLIGENCE FAILURES ARE STILL MISUNDERSTOOD
SAMUEL HELFONTMARCH 28, 2023
 
The United States invaded Iraq 20 years ago under false pretenses. Historians and social scientists have spent two decades investigating what went wrong. George W. Bush and other senior officials in his administration claimed former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. They also claimed that the Iraqi government had ties to nefarious groups such as al-Qaeda. Together, these two things posed an unacceptable threat to American security. Yet, once the American-led coalition toppled the Iraqi regime in 2003, it quickly became evident that there were no weapons of mass destruction or active ties to Osama bin Laden.

The narrative around the war is also controversial. Did the Bush administration actually believe that Saddam Hussein was a threat that had to be eliminated with military force, or did prominent U.S. officials simply cite the intelligence as a public justification for a war because they were eager to use the anger from 9/11 to remake the Middle East? 

Either way, historians are now tasked with finding out what happened. Their sometimes–provocative findings have often been buried in dense academic tomes or, in some cases, exiled from polite conversation due to the political toxicity of anything that might be seen as lending support for a disastrous and ill-conceived war. This has left popular discourse to partisans on all sides looking to score political points rather than investigate the past. As a result, much of the debate in the national security community remains rooted in long-dispelled narratives or even factual inaccuracies. Despite the conventional wisdom touted in recent retrospectives, Saddam did not pursue a strategy of ambiguity around his weapons of mass destruction programs to deter Iran. Neither did his Arab nationalist ideology prevent him from working with people like Osama bin Laden. Indeed, much of the current conventional wisdom suffers from the same sort of groupthink as the intelligence failures it criticizes; it coalesces around easily digestible but flawed analysis. The 20-year anniversary of the war provides the perfect occasion to take stock of what we now know about these most infamous of intelligence failures.

https://warontherocks.com/2023/03/the-iraq-wars-intelligence-failures-are-still-misunderstood/

DefiantMassRINO:
Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz wanted to "finish" the 1990s Gulf War by removing Saddam Hussein from power.  The post-911 War Against Terrorism was the perfect backdrop to manufacture a false, imminent threat from a fictional weapon of mass destruction.

Not many in Congress had the fortitude to challenge the White House's campaign to expand the War Against Terror to Iraq, especially those Dems looking to run for President in 2004.  They were afraid voting against war in Iraq would make them look weak in the War Against Terror.

Bush '43 White House decisions that were strategically inept.  Rumsfeld abandoned the Weinberger Doctrine of 9-1 force superiority to send too few, ill-equipped soldiers to deal with the post-invasion Sunni Iraqi insurgence.  The post-invasion situation was made worse by the appointment of Paul Bremer as Provisional Coalition Administrator of Iraq.

The pre-invasion "intelligence failure" was willful blindness to any intelligence which weakened the argument of an imminent threat of an Iraqi weapon of mass destruction, used to justify the invasion.

The post-invasion "intelligence failure" was a combination of willful blindness, incompetence, and politically corrupt motives of senior officials in the Bush '43 administration.

The Iraq Invasion of 2003 was a manufactured 2004 Presidential Campaign photo-op to give Bush '43 a military victory like Bush '41.

It was also an opening salvo to the effort to remake the world in America's image.  Neo-cons wanted America to liberate the world's peoples to build nations allegedly built upon shared American and Western values.

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