The second war with Iraq

Roughly ten years after the first war with Iraq, in the wake of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, we had the second war with Iraq, in the wake of the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers in 2001. As it happens, the first was started by Bush senior and the second was started by Bush junior.

This post being prompted by a rather depressing review (reference 1) of a book about why Bush junior started the second war.

We already knew that the war was a disaster, a disaster which ended very badly for hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. A disaster which replaced a brutal dictator by a bloody sectarian mess. So why did he do it?

The story seems to be that from being rather diffident and affable, being rather held back by his thin electoral mandate, Bush junior decided after 9/11 that Saddam Hussein was a bad man and that it was his job to take him out. A decision which appears to have just emerged from the Bush brain without any proper process at all. And for various reasons, mostly not very creditable, the machinery of government fell in behind him. The CIA in particular, keen to consolidate its renewed hold on a seat at the top table, told the President what it thought he wanted to hear. Dissent, there are elsewhere, was mostly squashed.

And so the President took the US (and the UK) to war without reason - at least without reasons that had not been fabricated - and without proper forethought and preparation.

What I find depressing today is that all the career civil servants and all the career soldiers - including many able people - some of whom did know better - did precious little to stop him. Not evidence that Western style, open democracy with tried and trusted machinery of government can be relied on to deliver the goods.

Reference 1: Why Did We Invade Iraq? - Fred Kaplan/NYRB - 2021.

Reference 2:  To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America into Iraq - Robert Draper - 2020.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_surveys_of_Iraq_War_casualties. I remember these surveys being rather shocking at the time, but I cannot turn up any notice of them.