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Notes -
Disclaimer: I was like 10 at the time, so directly I most remember just like, graphics on TV of the invasion with arrows and stuff.
I very much agree. I think what's also missing in the conversation is that it seems to me that the US population was also still pretty bloodthirsty at the time and honestly was relatively easy to convince. A lot of post-9/11 anger still without easy outlets (Afghanistan's insurgency hadn't yet kicked into major gear and was relatively quiet, Bin Laden was elusive, etc) was still in the air. Sure, Bush coined the Axis of Evil but a ton of people ate that stuff right up (maybe we didn't learn the Cold War lessons as deeply as we should have...) All of this means that when Iraq's stability had majorly deteriorated by early to mid 2004, at the same time that year the big post-op intel reports were coming out to the public and were pretty damning. In that context, I think there's a very human motivation to try and wash your own hands and absolve yourself of responsibility, and it's very easy and cheap to say "I was tricked". And even then, there's some major revisionism going on. Polling data and the behavior of politicians both seem to agree that a lot of the regret only started to spike when Iraq and then later Afghanistan war deaths continued to rise, which was well after the facts of Iraq's WMD's were well known. So yeah, people also "backdated" their opposition to the war quite a bit. All you need to do is simply look at the contrast of the 2004 and 2008 election seasons.
I always refer to this video lecture as a counter argument of why, at the time, the decision to invade Iraq can be justified by US/UK head of governement
It detailed the information available at the time for US/UK, then laid out the potential internal political backfire in case of Iraq actually having WMD and used it
After listening to the lecture, to me it always seems like invading Iraq is the rational move at the time with the available intel, while simultaneously and evidently a wrong decision after the fact as we gain more information due to the war
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