Comment by adventured | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adventured | Hacker News Reader

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The highest level politicians that took us into Iraq knew there were no WMD. They merely needed a good enough excuse to do it.

We've got four star general - US Presidential candidate, and NATO Supreme Allied Commander right before 9/11 - Wesley Clark admitting it in public on YouTube. I'll never understand why the most important policy admission of the last 30 years is intentionally ignored in all discussion of what the West is doing in Iraq, Syria, Libya, et al. This is the Western powers - led by the US - looking to strip Russia's power out of the Middle East (or at least break it). According to Clark, particularly before China completes its rise to power (which would present a demand to dilute focus, weakening the ability to challenge Russia's strategic goals). These proxy conflicts haven't stopped for a single day since WW2. Don't take my word for it, or Clark's for that matter, just look at the powers in Syria wrestling over who gets to keep or acquire influence (the US/West v Russia).

It's the politician's syllogism:

- We must do something

- This is something

- Therefore, we must do this.

After 9/11 the US had to do something, Afghanistan wasn't enough, so do Iraq.

They did Iraq right with Afghanistan because they had the war machine out of the box and the population revved up to allow it. If they had waited, the public and Congress would have been against it. Obama tested the waters for doing a larger war with Syria in 2013 (which would have attempted to ensure the removal of al-Assad), too much time had passed since 9/11 and people were very war weary by then. With almost no support for more big wars Congress shot it down and Obama abruptly backed down.

Sept 2013: "Obama Seeks Approval by Congress for Strike in Syria"

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/01/world/middleeast/syria.ht...

So, they choose Iraq randomly?

The idea of 'doing something' about Iraq was a lot older.

9/11 was just the excuse. When you read about the subject it's interesting to realize how many people in Washington was against that war, including the Pentagon and the State Department, but powerful interest prevailed.

From https://www.haaretz.com/1.4764706:

"Is the Iraq war the great neoconservative war? It's the war the neoconservatives wanted, Friedman says. It's the war the neoconservatives marketed. Those people had an idea to sell when September 11 came, and they sold it. Oh boy, did they sell it. So this is not a war that the masses demanded. This is a war of an elite. Friedman laughs: I could give you the names of 25 people (all of whom are at this moment within a five-block radius of this office) who, if you had exiled them to a desert island a year and a half ago, the Iraq war would not have happened. Still, it's not all that simple, Friedman retracts [..]"

I agree, definitely not random - it was sitting on the shelf waiting for someone to find an excuse to "do" it:

"Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable."

Milton Friedman

They already did something before 9/11 and I think that was a retaliation against an attack to a US embassy. And list goes on.

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