Iraq War Decision
Jul 2025 - Alex Alejandre

Leap of Faith - Iraq War Decision

  • The National Security Council believed once you “cut off the head” of the Iraqi government, you would witness a “rapid and inevitable march toward Jeffersonian democracy.” But the metaphor already fails, what marches after losing its head?

  • almost everyone, Democrat and Republican, was for it. As soon as he stopped being a client, everyone suddenly noticed his problems

    • in the 90s, e.g. Al Gore wrote op-eds calling for Saddam’s toppling
    • “destructive ambiguity” - everyone knew everyone else knew the policy was eliminating Saddam, but since it wasn’t official, it didn’t go through official channels, wasn’t formally debated…
    • Abilene Paradox - no one wants to, but everyone supports it, thinking everyone else does and don’t want to shake the boat
    • Bob Baer started organizing a coup in 95 for Ahmed Chalabi, thinking his superiors wanted it. His coup shared Strelkov’s Ukrainian strategy, sparking rebellion, which the other side would start to crush, causing the greater power to intervene!
      • Rumsfeld proposed making Chalabi ruler/dictatotr
      • Bush apparently considered Chalabi a conman and nixed it

  • Wolfowitz lost most of his family in the holocaust, dedicated his career to the US opposing tyranny and oppression everywhere

  • All American politicians have been “neocons” with a “missionary impulse” believing Americans are the good guys, who must right wrongs everywhere and freedom and democracy belong everywhere. Others, now and in the past, rather believe countries have core and peripheral interests, you shouldn’t interfere with core interests and different groups have different goals, leading to interesting diversity. Indeed, other countries don’t see themselves as “good guys” but a people.

our belief that we’re bombing you for your own good

  • Saddam’s regime dismantled WMDs in the 90s, but publicly pretended to still have them. Perhaps they pretended for prestige or against Iran, while believing US intelligence would figure it out.

    • As Ba’Athism opposed radical Sunni Islam, why would the US oppose him and e.g. not ask for help fighting it?

  • after 9/11, CIA Director George Tenetdescribed the White House as “more raw emotion in one place than I think I’ve ever experienced in my life.” They all thought they, personally, were in personal, physical danger.

    • they then further traumatized themselves starting every morning with the “threat matrix” listing all terror threats under investigation. Cheney articulated a one percent doctrine, requiring immediate action against anything with a 1% chance of being real.
    • Doug Feith and Rumsfeld communicated intentions against all terror groups, in Latin America etc. even.

  • the US admin believed dictatorships sponsor terrorism, so removing them would stop terrorism!

  • Afghanistan was going very well, making people feel sloppy regime change could work

  • large organizations are “artificial intelligences”, weirdly shaped minds. Are they super intelligent or retarded? In some ways both. But we humans do not understand how such (differently-shaped) cognitive architectures reach decisions.

  • because there was no concious decision, they never decided what they were actually doing

    • Rumsfeld just wanted to shrink the defense department, so he rejected all proposals, asking why they couldn’t be smaller etc. He rejected all “round numbers” of troops, believing they couldn’t be the result of considered analysis.
      • Russia too convinced itself it didn’t need a big footprint in Ukraine
      • neocons supported this, because the US needed spare capacity for Iran and other wars right after, which they called “recocking the pistol”
    • an aid agency asked who would provide security for reconstruction, a US officer suggested they “hire warlords”
    • a leader must ensure everyone knows what the goals, strategy, plan are, so they can work as a team. Yet Bush didn’t know them himself. So everyone was backstabbing each other

  • the US media jumped in line to push the war, even those opposing Bush parroted the WMD narrative etc. Al Gore, John Kerry and the Clintons supported it. Even 10 years later, only the far left and far right would discuss how bad this was

Both were firmly outside the window of acceptable opinion. This phenomenon, where an informational “firewall” is maintained against an obvious and important truth that could undermine the legitimacy of the entire system, is supposed to be something that only happens under oppressive or authoritarian governments

  • Cheney broke “norms” by ignoring bureaucracy (under him) and trying to get answers from the source.
  • Rumsfield was intelligent, like a debater. He could argue any side, but struggled to synthesize and integrate information into his own theory, picking sides due to convenience instead of belief. He could justify, but not choose action. kHe thought the military-industrial complex wasteful and sought to fight it, but found himself wielding it …against Iraq.
  • Collin Powell, often seen as an honorable man, was actually the man who covered up the My Lai massacre, writing “relations between…soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent." He was willing to do whatever his superiors wanted.
  • Condoleeza Rice was a child prodigy, by 3: violin, French, ballet, ran her parents’ household by 10 and started college at 15. Psmiths argue she was addicted to approval (as many child prodigies, leading to their failure. They seek ever further praise, but don’t learn to set their own objectives.)
  • George Bush Jr. found good people, put them in charge and vibed. If something breaks, you simply make a big decision and rest on your vibes. Conny said: “Very intuitive and insightful… He is somebody who very efficiently gets to the essence of a question… He least likes me to say, ‘This is complex.”

a man brimming with the most interesting contradictions: at once shrewd and intellectually lazy; aloof from the details of policy, and a recurrent micromanager of speeches and statements; humane and compassionate at some moments, and frat-boy cutting and dismissive at others; a faith-driven altruist capable of titanic outbursts of fury and profanity…essentially genuine and deeply committed to the well-being of the American people and to the promotion of freedom abroad…so heedless of detail as to be repeatedly shocked by the implications of his own choices. - Leap of Faith - Mazarr

I felt there was a real danger here that you could get bogged down in a long drawn out conflict…and then you’ve got to worry about what comes after. And then you have to accept the responsibility for what happens in Iraq, accept more responsibility for what happens in the region. It would have been an all-US operation, I don’t think any of our allies would have been with us, maybe Britain, but nobody else. And you’re going to take a lot more American casualties if you’re gonna go much around in Iraq for weeks on end trying to run Saddam Hussein to ground and capture Baghdad and so forth and I don’t think it would have been worth it. - Dick Cheney

General Wesley Clark Wars Were Planned Seven Countries In Five Years

he stated that Bush’s neocon team wanted to invade and destroy seven countries in five years: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Iran, none of which had anything to do with the supposed 9/11 attackers

This strategy was itself based on Israel’s 1996 policy document A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm. In this document Israel’s strategy for regional security included destabilizing and weakening key nations seen as threats. The document explicitly called for efforts to undermine and topple the regimes in Iraq and Syria. It proposed supporting internal opposition within Iraq to weaken Saddam Hussein’s regime, particularly due to concerns over Iraq’s military capabilities and potential weapons of mass destruction, while Syria was viewed as a major regional threat because of its alliance with Iran and its support for Hezbollah. Although not directly calling for military action, the strategy also outlined efforts to counter Iran’s growing regional influence, especially its nuclear ambitions. The overarching aim was to reshape the Middle East by destabilizing these nations to reduce the perceived threats to Israel’s security.

Richard Clark, on 9/12:

I expected to go back to a round of meetings examining what the next attacks could be, what our vulnerabilities were, what we could do about them in the short term. Instead, I walked into a series of discussions about Iraq. At first I was incredulous that we were talking about something other than getting al Qaeda. Then I realized with almost a sharp physical pain that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were going to try to take advantage of this national tragedy to promote their agenda about Iraq. Since the beginning of the administration, indeed well before, they had been pressing for a war with Iraq. My friends in the Pentagon had been telling me that the word was we would be invading Iraq sometime in 2002.

On the morning of the 12th DOD’s focus was already beginning to shift from al Qaeda. CIA was explicit now that al Qaeda was guilty of the attacks, but Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld’s deputy, was not persuaded. It was too sophisticated and complicated an operation, he said, for a terrorist group to have pulled off by itself, without a state sponsor—Iraq must have been helping them. I had a flashback to Wolfowitz saying the very same thing in April when the administration had finally held its first deputy secretary-level meeting on terrorism. When I had urged action on al Qaeda then, Wolfowitz had harked back to the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, saying al Qaeda could not have done that alone and must have had help from Iraq. The focus on al Qaeda was wrong, he had said in April, we must go after Iraqi-sponsored terrorism. He had rejected my assertion and CIA’s that there had been no Iraqi-sponsored terrorism against the United States since 1993. Now this line of thinking was coming back.

By the afternoon on Wednesday, Secretary Rumsfeld was talking about broadening the objectives of our response and “getting Iraq.” Secretary Powell pushed back, urging a focus on al Qaeda. Relieved to have some support, I thanked Colin Powell and his deputy, Rich Armitage. “I thought I was missing something here,” I vented. “Having been attacked by al Qaeda, for us now to go bombing Iraq in response Evacuate the White House 31 would be like our invading Mexico after the Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor.” Powell shook his head. “It’s not over yet.” Indeed, it was not. Later in the day, Secretary Rumsfeld complained that there were no decent targets for bombing in Afghanistan and that we should consider bombing Iraq, which, he said, had better targets. At first I thought Rumsfeld was joking. But he was serious and the President did not reject out of hand the idea of attacking Iraq. Instead, he noted that what we needed to do with Iraq was to change the government, not just hit it with more cruise missiles, as Rumsfeld had implied.

Critiques on this

As to the Iraqi nuclear weapons story, we forget that the assertion about those weapons was only one of about 16 different justifications given for the attack. The bureaucracy treated the criticisms of Iraq as if they were arraigning Al Capone – if we can’t get him on murder charges, at least we can get him on tax evasion. That kind of shotgun approach may work in the vile US “legal” system, but it is no way to run foreign policy.

Do you have any programs going on that I don’t know about? - Saddam in 1998

So firmly did Saddam believe in the underlying unity of the world that after enduring years of unrelenting UN inspections, he began to wonder if maybe Iraq did secretly possess WMDs after all. Why else would the Swedes keep badgering him? “Do you have any programs going on that I don’t know about?” he asked his deputy prime minister in 1998. “Absolutely not,” the minister replied, thinking this was a loyalty test—and only later realizing that the dictator was in earnest. Not long after, another one of Saddam’s aides approached him with the same question. “Do we have WMD?” he asked. “Don’t you know?” Saddam replied. “No!” the minister yelped. “No,” Saddam said. And when Saddam announced to his generals on the eve of the Iraq War that Iraq definitely did not possess nuclear weapons, many were surprised. They had always assumed that his constant questions about the subject implied some radiant secret, hidden from all eyes but his own.