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I don't recall that being any part of the rationale for the US war in Iraq (which, to be clear, will hopefully go down as the least just war the US ever instiga
by tptacek 10mo ago
I don't recall that being any part of the rationale for the US war in Iraq (which, to be clear, will hopefully go down as the least just war the US ever instigated). "We'll be greeted as liberators" was trotted out as a mitigation for how bad occupations normally are, but we were going whether or not that was true. The Iraq war was not a war of liberation against an unjust government. It was a war of choice against a country that happened to have a horrendously unjust government.
The pretext for the Iraq war was that they were involved in 9/11 and possessed weapons of mass destruction.
- dTal 10mo agoIt absolutely was a large part of the general snowstorm of rationales offered. "Regime change" they called it, remember? This Guardian article[0] is a wonderful little window into the zeitgeist of the time. You can see that many commentators explicitly cite the "brutal dictator" rationale, notably Salman Rushdie. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2003/jan/19/foreignpolicy.iraq https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2003/jan/19/foreignpoli...
- tptacek 10mo agoLots of people on both ends of the political spectrum supported it at the time, because Baathism truly was nightmarish, and because almost everyone disastrously overestimated the competence of American war leadership. But, whatever the rationale amongst the rest of the "Coalition of the Willing" might have been, the core claim of the war's instigators in the US was WMD. Regime change was a mechanism for decisively eliminating terrorist threats.