Why Did We Invade Iraq?

Published on April 28th, 2015 | http://www.lobelog.com/why-did-we-invade-iraq/#more-29049

by Charles Davis 
I was 18 years old and as dumb as an 18-year-old, and even I knew we were invading Iraq for no good reason and that thousands of good people were going to die awful deaths because of it. The 2003 war to end all Gulf wars was sold as a mission to disarm a madman with weapons of mass destruction. But despite the revisionists who claim that everybody thought at the time that this crime was called for, it was clear from the start—from the weapons inspectors on the ground inspecting and not finding a damn thing—that the stated reasons for going to war were as flimsy as the case for invading Vietnam and as fabricated as the non-incident in the Gulf of Tonkin. So why did a couple hundred thousand people have to die?
That’s one of the other things that was glaringly obvious to dumb kids like me but not, it seemed, the neoconservatives in the Bush administration or their liberal enablers in the press. This war in Iraq was sold as a war on a bad man and a few of his bad friends, who nobody outside the Ba’ath Party would much miss. But if the history of wars has taught us anything it’s that wars against cabals are in fact wars against entire countries. The elites are always the last to suffer. No matter how precise the bomb, that precision isn’t worth much if one’s intelligence is bad or one’s concern for civilian “collateral damage” utterly lacking. And so it was that, according to Human Rights Watch, “Of the fifty aerial strikes against Iraqi leaders, not one resulted in the death of the intended target.” A strike at the start of the war that the US was “confident” had killed Saddam Hussein “missed its target and hit nearby homes, killing at least eight people,” The Telegraph reported.http://www.lobelog.com/why-did-we-invade-iraq/#more-29049