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I've tended to take the darker view: that the war's planners knew it was going to be a tar pit, but lied us into it with promises of "quick in, quick out" and s

by api 12y ago

I've tended to take the darker view: that the war's planners knew it was going to be a tar pit, but lied us into it with promises of "quick in, quick out" and such (as well as the active WMD program hoax). Possible motives range from religious nuttery to just wanting to line the pockets of contractors. I've suspected religious nuttery for a while because there was just so much of it in the Bush administration. I think a lot of more secular minded folks and religious folks who aren't fundamentalist Bible-belter types just don't get how seriously those people believe in that stuff. The end times are just around the corner. Jesus is coming back. Oh, and the Earth is 6000 years old. They really absolutely believe every bit of it. It's not just a rationalization or a smokescreen, at least not from the point of view of the true believers. (Others may certainly use it that way.) It was likely a mixture of the two: contractors manipulating the belief systems of the fundamentalists in the Bush administration to profit from a long drawn-out war.

BugBrother 12y ago
>>active WMD program hoax I've seen those claims a lot. I haven't seen references to all the leaks to support it. Do you have any? (I have seen quite believable motivations for Saddam Hussein to lie, like keeping Iran and the Kurds short. But I have never seen leaks supporting the conspiracy theory that Bush' administration knew the WMDs was a bluff before the 2nd Iraq war.)
- api 12y ago
  Either they knew it was a bluff or our intelligence was either totally wrong or allowed itself to be misled. None of those make the Bush administration look good. I find the naïveté argument hard to swallow. The U.S. has the best intelligence agencies and network in the world.
  - XorNot 12y ago
    Which were explicitly dismantled piece by piece in the lead up to the war: the thing Cheney and co. did was ignore the analysts and ask for raw intelligence data, absent the interpretation by people who studied the region for decades. Interestingly, this exact problem is what is also cited as one of the reasons the Soviets thought the Able Archer exercise in 1983 might be a real NATO pre-emptive strike: senior spies in London and elsewhere weren't told to send their analysis back to Moscow, just their observations. Meaning they defeated the entire point of having spies in place to start with (people who lived and understood the culture being able to explain it to others).

by api 12y ago

BugBrother 12y ago

>>active WMD program hoax I've seen those claims a lot. I haven't seen references to all the leaks to support it. Do you have any? (I have seen quite believable motivations for Saddam Hussein to lie, like keeping Iran and the Kurds short. But I have never seen leaks supporting the conspiracy theory that Bush' administration knew the WMDs was a bluff before the 2nd Iraq war.)

api 12y ago
Either they knew it was a bluff or our intelligence was either totally wrong or allowed itself to be misled. None of those make the Bush administration look good. I find the naïveté argument hard to swallow. The U.S. has the best intelligence agencies and network in the world.
- XorNot 12y ago
  Which were explicitly dismantled piece by piece in the lead up to the war: the thing Cheney and co. did was ignore the analysts and ask for raw intelligence data, absent the interpretation by people who studied the region for decades. Interestingly, this exact problem is what is also cited as one of the reasons the Soviets thought the Able Archer exercise in 1983 might be a real NATO pre-emptive strike: senior spies in London and elsewhere weren't told to send their analysis back to Moscow, just their observations. Meaning they defeated the entire point of having spies in place to start with (people who lived and understood the culture being able to explain it to others).