Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

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I think there are factors other than oil at work. Given the extreme fundamentalist religiosity of the Bush administration, I've suspected for quite some time that Iraq was driven by religious imperatives at the top with 9/11 and possibly oil used as rationalizations.

I think it's well within the realm of possibility that the U.S. spent some number of trillions (I've heard from one to four) of dollars of taxpayer money to attempt to initiate the Biblical apocalypse and the second coming of Christ. Since WWII every major military event or war has been seen by that crowd as a sign that "it is the hour of the time," 9/11 certainly included. The fact that it happened right about at the millennium added even more fuel to the fire.

Throughout history leaders have often squandered the wealth of their kingdoms on crazy religious crusades, and being either rich or politically powerful does not exclude one from believing in things that are completely bat-guano insane.

It's one of the only explanations for Iraq that really makes sense to me. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 and it would have been far cheaper to develop better oil drilling technology here at home than to invade for oil. The war cost more than developing the entire Bakken play. It would also have been cheaper and ultimately more effective to deploy a missile defense shield and better border screening for hazardous materials if we were really concerned about WMDs. For a trillion dollars we could likely field Reagan's Star Wars dream complete with a staffed orbital space laser command.

I just finished reading Confessions of an Economic Hitman, I'll spare the details, but the premise is essentially all driven by economics and power. An Iraq aligned with the US means more to US corporations and power over the next few decades than the cost of the war.

If you examine history, you'll find that all too often religious motivations have been more about power than gods.

Hmm... so you think it's just pure realpolitik and long-term geostrategic stuff.

It just seems awfully expensive for that. Of course I suppose it's possible that they actually thought it would be easy and that the Iraqis would just cheer us as we rolled in.

People forget that the Iraq was supposed to be a quick get-in, get-out job.

That's why they never went in with overwhelming force but instead the lighter, cheaper force. History has of course shown that it was a dreadful decision.

I've tended to take the darker view: that the war's planners knew it was going to be a tar pit, but lied us into it with promises of "quick in, quick out" and such (as well as the active WMD program hoax). Possible motives range from religious nuttery to just wanting to line the pockets of contractors.

I've suspected religious nuttery for a while because there was just so much of it in the Bush administration. I think a lot of more secular minded folks and religious folks who aren't fundamentalist Bible-belter types just don't get how seriously those people believe in that stuff. The end times are just around the corner. Jesus is coming back. Oh, and the Earth is 6000 years old. They really absolutely believe every bit of it. It's not just a rationalization or a smokescreen, at least not from the point of view of the true believers. (Others may certainly use it that way.)

It was likely a mixture of the two: contractors manipulating the belief systems of the fundamentalists in the Bush administration to profit from a long drawn-out war.

>>active WMD program hoax

I've seen those claims a lot. I haven't seen references to all the leaks to support it. Do you have any?

(I have seen quite believable motivations for Saddam Hussein to lie, like keeping Iran and the Kurds short. But I have never seen leaks supporting the conspiracy theory that Bush' administration knew the WMDs was a bluff before the 2nd Iraq war.)

Either they knew it was a bluff or our intelligence was either totally wrong or allowed itself to be misled. None of those make the Bush administration look good.

I find the naïveté argument hard to swallow. The U.S. has the best intelligence agencies and network in the world.

Which were explicitly dismantled piece by piece in the lead up to the war: the thing Cheney and co. did was ignore the analysts and ask for raw intelligence data, absent the interpretation by people who studied the region for decades.

Interestingly, this exact problem is what is also cited as one of the reasons the Soviets thought the Able Archer exercise in 1983 might be a real NATO pre-emptive strike: senior spies in London and elsewhere weren't told to send their analysis back to Moscow, just their observations. Meaning they defeated the entire point of having spies in place to start with (people who lived and understood the culture being able to explain it to others).

Honestly... I hope it was pure realpolitik and long term strategic thinking. The alternative of "spreading freedom" and taking the fight "over there" weaves a narrative that is harder for me to accept.

"Hmm... so you think it's just pure realpolitik and long-term geostrategic stuff."

Yes, I don't think you have to look much farther than that. The prospect of a nuclear militant Islamists is bad enough to be worth deterring, even if our current administration does not share this view.

History may yet judge the Iraq intervention as not enough rather than too much. I hope not, because the sequence of events that would take is not pleasant to contemplate. Unfortunately the very act of ignoring the possibility brings it that much closer.

I'd at least nod to this argument a little had Saddam not been a secular dictator and an enemy of Islamist factions. He was an awful guy, but not one of them.

nuclear militant Islamists

That would explain an attack on Iran or Pakistan, but not on Iraq.

Cost-benefit was never part of the planning. And they did cheer us as we rolled in. That lasted a few days.

I think the assumption was that it would go like Nicaragua; US invasion led by rebel faction. Chalabi would be installed as puppet govenor. The planners did not expect ethnic or sectarian conflict to be unmanageable; presumably once the oil started flowing the locals would be co-opted with the money.

What they hadn't realised was that "de-Baathification" meant the removal of the entire class and system by which Iraq might be governed, and therefore the destruction of "Iraq" as a state-concept. The replacement parliament was explicitly sectarian, accelerating the split into Sunni-Iraq (now under the control of ISIS), Shia-Iraq (the nominally legitimate government, now being supported by Iran), and Kurdistan.

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