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It absolutely was a large part of the general snowstorm of rationales offered. "Regime change" they called it, remember? This Guardian article[0] is a wonderfu
by dTal 8mo ago
It 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 8mo 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.