I always thought the argument by the naysayers is that hindsight is a wonderful thing as who didn't believe the evidence being presented?

Anyone with a brain

6. The should have realized that the objectives were unclear and that the hurdles to achieving a functional regime change without sectarian violence were too high to justify the financial and human costs of war.

The war was a bad idea even were the WMD stuff true, and everyone in power knew it was bullshit also.

Yup. Bush’s response right on the eve of the invasion, when told that there was a very high chance of sectarian religious violence between Shiite, Sunnis and Kurds was supposedly “I thought the Iraqis were Muslims”.

The WMDs were a side issue. Bush thought that removing Sadam would be like liberating France after WWII. Come in, get rid of the baddies and hand it back over. If that was the case, the invasion would have been completely worth it and nobody would have cared whether WMDs were there or not.

That was idea, although they did think they were there.

I think that the bolded is mostly true. If, against all odds, the U.S. had successfully replaced Saddam with an durable functioning democracy, and if Saddam had been toppled without excessive civilian casualties, and if the sectarian violence had not occurred, then the lies about the evidence of WMDs would have ended up being a historical footnote.

The lies became more important because, after it was obvious that Irag had turned into a shitshow, people justifiably wanted to know how such a disastrous decision had been made in the first place.

Bush was able to refer to the Iraq Liberation Act 1998 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Liberation_Act), passed by Congress and inked by President Clinton. The act called for US co-operation with Iraqi democratic movements rather than military action, but it was, rather obviously, a bad and stupid piece of law.

Even so, if the Americans had been prepared to commit sufficient boots on the ground to ensure Iraq's security after the overthrow of Saddam -- which would probably have required a considerable expansion of the US military -- things wouldn't have been so bad.

Instead the US was stuck with the 'Rumsfeld doctrine', which stated that 'full-spectrum dominance' (computers and stuff plus air power, even though not very much air power was committed to Operation Iraqi Freedom by comparison with Operation Desert Storm) reduced the need for boots on the ground.

In fact, of course, boots on the ground really do matter, and the US had made the same mistake before, in Normandy in 1944. They thought that armour, artillery, air power and logistics rendered the infantry all but redundant, so only the least educationally qualified men were selected for infantry and no one selected for other specialist tasks was even given basic infantry training. (Compare with the British service, where even Spitfire pilots had all learned to march and drill and use the Lee-Enfield rifle, the .38 revolver and the Bren gun in basic training, in case they failed their specialised courses and had to be remustered as infantry.) And just two weeks after D-Day, First US Army ran out of trained infantry casualty replacements and had to start combing untrained men out of the Services of Supply and the Air Corps (there were a lot of surplus radio operators) and so on, and shoving them into frontline foxholes, a hundred yards from the nearest German, with a rifle they'd never seen before, let alone fired. During the whole of the Normandy campaign, only one-third of the casualty replacements sent to the US infantry units were even rifle-trained. The effect on the US infantry casualty rate was... interesting. And tragic.

Before the Trump administration, I would have said Donald Rumsfeld was the most loathsome person to hold a high level government position in my lifetime. And I wouldn't have put Paul Wolfowitz far behind Rumsfeld.

Yeah, the biggest problem was Bush, Rumsfeld etc didn’t seem to understand that the chances of a smooth and peaceful transition to democracy in a post Sadam Iraq was virtually nil. They thought getting rid of the existing regime was the hard part when in reality it was by far the easiest.

ur beggin the question about if they give a rats assz about that

See this is my issue. If I believe you that you doubted it rather than the majority including the majority of Democrat supporters and saw all the issues that were caused by it (civilian deaths, etc), yet for that grave mistake that you think Bush made you still think Trump is worse and this was before COVID-19?

nah Cheney

huh? I have always maintained Bush was worse than Trump. its one of the things that really pisses me off about the Dems and the establishment and the media. Bush being reformed is like Hellworld level bad.

and yes, you can find plenty of my posts on this very site from 02/03 prior to the War arguing it was a lie and a mistake.

Good to know.

It was maybe worse than that, in that Rumsfeld appeared to believe that American capitalist democracy (actually oligarchy) is the natural condition of humankind, and would therefore naturally emerge from a state of chaos, so he set about achieving a state of chaos in Iraq. He seems to have been mildly disappointed by the result, but no big deal because he's got his pension pot anyway. And, as the US isn't a state party to the International Criminal Court, he's invulnerable.

Intelligent people like you need to seriously consider running for office.

What about Obama then who did the same thing as Bush then?

Both, but mainly the latter. The Bush administration's attempts to prove Iraq had WMDs was a parade of lies, half-truths, and throwing crap at the wall to see what stuck. By the time the Powell testimony came out the administration lost all credibility (with me anyway).

That said, imo the issue of WMDs was mainly superfluous. In the post Gulf War climate the surest way for Saddam Hussein to destroy his own power would have been to use a WMD on a US ally. He also had no means of setting off a WMD on US soil, so the threat to America was tiny even if we did know he had them.

IMO the real reason for the Iraq war stemmed from the neocon fantasy that you could replace a foreign government you don't like by invading it and starting a democracy that would automatically be pro-American. Hussein's Iraq wasn't any more immoral than Mugabe's Zimbabwe or Al-Bashir's Sudan. The fact that Iraq sat/sits on top of a lake of oil and Zimbabwe and Sudan don't seemed awfully convenient.

while I am no Obama fan, I dont think you want to compare his body count with Bush's.

You are still not answering his question.

I’ll try to answer. A no vote at the time was based on the belief that the worst case scenario wasn’t worth committing USA troops to an Iraq invasion. It could be handled better with diplomacy.

The question is kinda dumb because it leaves out the obvious point that invading Iraq was a foreseeable disaster and that was crucial whether they had WMDs or not. We know North Korea has them and still don’t invade for the same reason.