Why Did the United States Invade Iraq? The Debate at 20 Years
tnsr.org
tnsr.org
why are they so reluctant to acknowledge that the US didn’t need to do anything, America’s territorial unity isn’t threatened by its people getting a dose of that. It was an opportunistic thing during a brief time period where the President had a 90% approval rating.
There seems to be no extant scholarship adopting the view it was just an unfortunate outgrowth of, well, call it the politics of expedience following the tragedy of 9/11, for example, which merely utilized the notion of "grand coherent plan" for PR and window-dressing purposes, without entailing the actual existence of any substantial grand coherent plan.
The "cultural turn" section at the end holds out some hope for less entrenched scholarship, amusingly describing such marginalized views as "stovepiped [see: 1] from mainstream scholarship".
1: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/10/27/the-stovepipe