by flory
Ezra is looking for some help identifying the reasons behind the Iraq invasion -- not the post hoc rationalizations floating around today, but some identifiable reaons why the Bush Administration decided to take this country to war in Iraq as a response to 9/11.
Although he doesn't say it in so many words, I suspect the basic problem here is that Ezra is looking for some kind of rational, geopolitical basis for Bunnypant's signature fuckup - and there simply isn't one. There really was no single reason or coherent set of reasons why this nation had to invade a fifth rate military power that posed no threat to our national interests. Rather there was a perfect storm of obsessions, hidden agendas and garden variety self-interest that intersected in Baghdad:
Halliburton and oil. Dick Cheney might be a late nite punchline, but he's also been the single most powerful vice president evah -- and he ran Haliburton. The Bush family made a lot of money in the oil bidness. Controlling access to the world's second biggest proven oil reserves really wasn't incidental to the decision.
Military/Industrial/Intelligence complex. It's hard to overstate how badly the wind down of the Cold War hurt the profits of the defense industry, and the Afghanistan war was never envisioned as big enough to reverse the trend. Iraq always showed the promise of justifying a massive build-up of military hardware and privatized support services.
Family history. Bush has daddy issues and daddy failed in Iraq. It might be trite, but that doesn't make it any less true.
PNAC. Let's face it, if the founders of PNAC -- and influential policy wonks for the Bush Administration -- had been named O'Malley and Chin and Juarez, the defense establishment would probably have kept their eyes on Afghanistan and Pakistan after 9/11. Instead they were named Kristol and Kagan and Wolfowitz and had some pre-existing obsessions when it came to defense priorities.
The intellectual vacuum at the center. Bush is an easily manipulated boob who thinks he's an intellectual (witness this howler). There's nobody on the planet easier to play than that guy.
The hardest part in identifying the rationale behind Iraq is accepting that the 'most powerful nation in history' could have been suckered so badly.
