I was looking at a post on Center for Media and Democracy taken from The National Security Archive and it brought to mind a nagging question: just why did the Bush administration feel they had to invade Iraq? The available information that I’ve seen does a good job of drawing the timeline of events and decisions, (see the PBS Frontline special Bush’s War and this wonderful project Inquiry into the Decision to Invade Iraq) but neither distills it down to a simple, believable, black and white “quid pro quo“.
I just have a hard time believing that Ahmad Chalabi conned the White House into this whole thing. This article in The Independent from May of last year has a telling quote that illuminates the point:
“Did he invent evidence of weapons of mass destruction or prompt witnesses to do so? In fact all the opposition, particularly the Kurdish security services, were doing this. But it was absurd for the CIA and assorted American services and newspapers along with MI6 to later claim that they were misled. They knew what President George Bush and Tony Blair wanted and gave it to them.”
(italics mine)
What did they want?
If you place the article from the National Security Archive on the timeline it supports the contention that the Bush cabinet had a hard-on for attacking Iraq, what the Phase II report termed a fixation on Iraq, but none of the accumulation of data dares to define a reason, short of saying that the White House deemed Saddam Hussein a threat to U.S. security.
Now, my admittedly hyperactive conspiracy theory gland wants me to say that it was something as simple as oil or Haliburton contracts (see this aforementioned timeline to see the links to the Oil hypothesis) but my logic gland wants somebody else with a bigger brain to link all the beads together. And at that point if the conclusion is as nefarious, nay criminal as my gut tells me it is, then when do we start throwing the obvious criminals in jail?
Posted by E. P. 
Posted by E. P. 