The Real Reason for Iraq?

Just released: the report from the commission studying the CIA’s failure to properly assess Iraq’s weapon capabilities. The NYT headlines Report Assails CIA for Failure on Iraq Weapons.

Of course, with the promising events in Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and elsewhere, it appears the best reason for going into Iraq was to establish a region-altering democracy. Was this transformative democracy motivation the real reason we went to Iraq?

This essay thinks so. And the Bush Administration was certainly disingenuous in the way they led us into the war (Just examples: The President’s false claims about yellow cake uranium, National Security Advisor Rice’s hyperbolic “mushroom cloud” rhetoric and VP Cheney’s regular insinuations that Iraq played a roll in 9/11). It isn’t out of the realm of possibility that WMD were always just a secondary motivation.

After all, weapons were never found, but Bush could very well be right that freedom in Iraq will be the catalyst for a Middle Eastern democracy movement.

This 2003 Weekly Standard article makes a convincing claim that disarming Iraq of WMD truly was Bush’s primary motivation. But given how effortlessly the Bushies abandoned the weapons argument and adopted the “freedom is on the march” rhetoric, we should all wonder if whether this administration didn’t really trust us with the truth of their motivations.