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.
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.
That would explain an attack on Iran or Pakistan, but not on Iraq.
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.
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 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.
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.)
I find the naïveté argument hard to swallow. The U.S. has the best intelligence agencies and network in the world.
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).