Michael Ledeen played a key role in making the phony case for the invasion of Iraq—and other damaging skullduggery.
Michael Ledeen, the controversial national security journalist, scholar and schemer who died at age 83 on May 17 from complications following a stroke, played a significant covert role leading up to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, as well as other productions of false intelligence for political ends.
Ledeen was featured prominently in The Italian Letter, a 2007 book by SpyTalk Contributing Editor Peter Eisner and Knut Royce, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter at Newsday. Obituaries published this week gave scant attention to the key role Ledeen played in fabricating intelligence to justify the eventually disastrous military campaign to oust Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein from power. The main goal of toppling the regime was achieved but the succeeding occupation, at a cost of an estimated $2 trillion, has been judged a military and diplomatic disaster resulting in 37,000 U.S. casualties, at least 200,000 and possibly a million Iraqi civilians dead due to war-related action, and the creation of a virtual Iranian client state in Baghdad.
It was hardly Ledeen’s first foray into skullduggery. In 1980, according to an investigation five years later by the Wall Street Journal, he was involved in a “disinformation campaign” to discredit President Jimmy Carter’s brother Billy to the benefit of Republican candidate Ronald Reagan. He also published discredited theories that Soviet Bulgaria was behind the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II. "With Ronald Reagan newly installed in the White House,” journalist Craig Unger wrote in Vanity Fair, “the so-called Bulgarian Connection made perfect Cold War propaganda. Michael Ledeen was one of its most vocal proponents, promoting it on TV and in newspapers all over the world."
Ledeen’s role in the Iraq tragedy is a case study of the manipulation of secret—and blatantly dishonest—intelligence relationships for political aims.
The Italian Letter found that Ledeen, a behind-the-scenes, unofficial envoy of the George W. Bush administration, was deeply involved with Italian military intelligence, which in turn created a forged letter falsely claiming that Hussein had purchased yellow cake—lightly processed uranium—from Niger to build nuclear weapons. President Bush then used that forged information to declare, in his 2003 State of the Union message, that, “The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
This is a largely hidden but important chapter in the secret history of America that deserves more attention before time further clouds the facts. A lightly edited excerpt from The Italian Letter follows here:
In October 2002, Carlo Rossella, editor of the influential Italian news magazine Panorama, brought aboard Michael Arthur Ledeen, a prominent, controversial American neoconservative, as a columnist. Ledeen, who had longtime CIA contacts, had been allegedly involved in Italian intelligence operations for decades.
Panorama published a question and answer interview with Ledeen in the October 3, 2002 edition of the magazine. The occasion was the publication of Ledeen’s book, “The War Against the Terror Masters.” In the interview … Ledeen echoed administration pablum about Iraq and the ‘Axis of Evil,’ first declared by Bush in his January 29, 2002 State of the Union address. Ledeen said that US intervention was necessary in Iraq but only as part of a “war of liberation” to “free the Iranian, Iraqi, Syrian and Saudi populations from the tyrants” that rule them.
Ledeen advocated US intervention in Iraq and elsewhere. He said: “This intervention is necessary. But my opinion is that it would be more effective to start with Iran, because that is the easiest country to liberate. There would be not even a need for military intervention: our best weapon is the Iranians themselves, who hate the regime and who are prepared to face great risks to overthrow their tyrants.”
Panorama published at least eighteen commentaries by Ledeen in 2002 and 2003 after that. His columns also appeared regularly in the conservative National Review in the United States.
Ledeen also was a fellow at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, where he was an associate of James Woolsey, the former CIA director, as well as of other high-octane defense and intelligence veterans who supported and encouraged the Bush administration’s drive in Iraq. Twenty years earlier, Ledeen had worked with the Iran-Contra team that set up its “off the shelf” policy to support Nicaragua’s right-wing contra rebels, while participating in secret negotiations with Iran.
Because of his historical ties to Italy’s power structure and to the Italian intelligence services, Ledeen was later mentioned by many conspiracy buffs as someone who might have had a hand in the Italian letter’s evolution from forgery to intelligence. Ledeen denied any involvement and no evidence was uncovered suggesting otherwise. “I was the target of lies,” he said. “If you feel obliged to repeat those lies, then you will be putting yourself in the same category,” he added, with obvious indignation.
Rumors of Ledeen’s involvement in the Niger uranium forgeries were fanned by disclosure in August 2003 that with the assistance of SISMI [Italian military intelligence] he had arranged for a hush-hush meeting involving Pentagon officials, alleged Iranian intelligence agents and a noted Iranian fabricator, Manucher Ghorbanifar.
Despite his murky past, Ledeen continued to maintain high-level contacts in the White House, including with the president’s top political adviser, Karl Rove. David Kay, who led the CIA-directed post-invasion WMD search team, the Iraq Survey Group, discovered that another of Ledeen’s contacts was Vice President Cheney. At one point during the futile search for Saddam’s weapons Kay received a cable from the CIA telling him that Cheney wanted him to send someone to Switzerland to meet with Ghorbanifar. The never-say-die Iranian con man had a source who, for a mere $2 million (paid in advance), would provide intelligence on Iraq’s nuclear weapons. Kay cabled back to the CIA saying he would not meet with the “known fabricator-peddler” unless ordered to do so. The orders never came. Kay subsequently “discovered the latest Ghorbanifar stunt involved Michael Ledeen.”
“Everyone tells me Michael Ledeen is not a stupid person,” said Bill Murray, former CIA chief of station in Paris, where Ghorbanifar lives. “Then why does he persist in this (fronting for Ghorbanifar)?”
The phony intelligence proved instrumental in creating a case for the U.S. invasion of Iraq. But to the end, Ledeen denied any role in the Italian machinations.
In 2016, Ledeen co-authored a book, The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies, with retired Gen. Michael T. Flynn, who would serve a brief and controversial term as national security adviser in President Donald Trump’s first term in office. In that book, he and Flynn said Iran, not Iraq should have been the principal military target in stopping the threat of international terrorism. Flynn was convicted on charges of lying to the FBI but later pardoned by Trump.
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Comments
By jaybrendansmith 2025-05-2516:475 reply This is the last time I felt the power of the propaganda machine. (The most recent time was the 2024 election) It was so obvious to myself and my friends that this was completely cooked up intelligence. And yet the truth was not getting out, and had fooled many people with this strange groupthink, almost like a dumb, braying herd animal, where the collective intelligence was utterly ambushed and tied up in a sack. I don't like feeling powerless, yet I have this feeling that our voices have been smothered of late, destroyed by ridiculous talking points.
If you didn't feel the machine in all those other cases it has gone full swing since then, that just means these two attempts were extremely crude by comparison (and they were indeed). But Cambridge Analytica has really ushered us into a new era of manipulation, where most citizens don't even have the slightest chance of perceiving how they are getting played by nefarious actors. And that was just the tip of the iceberg. Today we have stuff like the Saudis buying access to Twitter/X after getting busted for planting literal double agents inside the company. The level and sophistication of propaganda we see right now is unprecedented in human history.
By fooblaster 2025-05-2523:473 reply [flagged]
By sigmoid10 2025-05-2615:38 >Cambridge analytica had absolutely no impact on the election whatsoever
Say the guys who were implicated and facing public humiliation or even punishment. Meta has already paid billions of dollars in fines and settlements because of this, so all these people not covering their asses would actually be surprising. But if you look at the raw evidence uncovered during the senate hearings, there is no doubt that it had a major effect on the election and beyond.
An interesting assertion. A quick Google search didn't turn up anything definitive for me. Do you have references?
By fooblaster 2025-05-262:56 One of many: https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/researcher-in-fac...
see comments of hacker news threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20800031
By hulitu 2025-05-265:19 > Cambridge analytica had absolutely no impact on the election whatsoever,
Of course not. They weren't even active on Facebook, they were selling potatoes at the local market. /s
By princealiiiii 2025-05-2517:175 reply The same propoganda machine has been on full effect in Israel's war on Gaza with American support. As soon as the attacks happened, there was a rush of propaganda (40 beheaded babies, mass rapes) to make the Hamas attacks seem completely unprovoked to justify the complete destruction of Gaza. The good news is Americans are more questioning this time of why they need to be involved in this at all.
By _DeadFred_ 2025-05-2617:02 Yeah, friggen Hamas publishing their videos of themselves kidnapping 6 year old girls (that one still haunts me), or videos of themselves parading around young dead womens almost nude bodies and spitting on her. Pure fake propaganda, the videos Hamas published of themselves that the world saw that very day.
By sebastos 2025-05-2614:08 What happened “as soon as the attack happened” was you had Hamas apologists pre-emotively criticizing Israel BEFORE there was even time for any response to have happened. A moral absurdity.
“Palestinians didn’t kill as many babies or do as many rapes as people say they did” does not cut as deep as you seem to think it does. The Oct 7th atrocities were atrocities, in the fullest sense of that word.
I am getting the compete opposite side, on average. Although Western states are very pro Israel, everything I read on social media is pro Palestine. On the street even more so (across a lot of countries).
> Although Western states are very pro Israel.
They're not, you're simply misinformed. The US and Germany have been. Countries like Ireland, Spain and Scotland have not. A lot of others have been somewhere inbetween, often as weakly-held beliefs. It's been very low on the list of priorities for people in country like Belgium, they might have been nominally pro-Irsael, but without caring particularly much. Now that Israel has been genociding for a year, except for those first two almost every Western state is largely pro-Palestine.
Unless you're purely talking about governments instead of the populace, but that makes no sense in this context of talking about social media.
By nicbou 2025-05-2613:18 I meant governments, not people. On the ground in Berlin, Germany definitely isn't pro-Israel.
By Duwensatzaj 2025-05-262:491 reply What’s hilarious is how the “40 beheaded babies” claim is indeed propaganda - from Hamas apologists.
The original statement is that 40 infants were murdered during the Oct 7th massacre and infants were beheaded, no number given. This somehow mutated into the claim that all 40 murdered infants were beheaded so the claim could be ridiculed.
By zoklet-enjoyer 2025-05-263:071 reply By Duwensatzaj 2025-06-0616:36 Sorry, I don't have Gell-Mann amnesia - Wikipedia is not a trustworthy source on controversial claims like this based on the outright lies I've seen on things I know.
By proshno 2025-05-2518:18 [dead]
I was also puzzled about the low quality of the lies and how little they were challenged at the time. I watched that presentation with the trucks - wow that was bad. As if it was being sabotaged on purpose by people who didn't want to do it. But it worked anyway!
By ahartmetz 2025-05-2613:16 By the way, there's a decent quality German (but most of the talking is in English) docu-drama about the intelligence campaign, it's called Curveball.
By fred_is_fred 2025-05-2619:05 The Weapons of mass destruction were easy, west, north, and south of this comment.
By CoastalCoder 2025-05-2522:185 reply It certainly is making me wonder about the supposed benefits of democracy.
If our votes, even those of our elected representatives, are so easily manipulated, then what's the point?
My question isn't entirely rhetorical. I'm hoping someone can talk me out of that conclusion.
By mediumsmart 2025-05-264:243 reply Democracy still is a good idea.
By ndsipa_pomu 2025-05-268:231 reply Only with an educated population. An uneducated population is more easily swayed by cults of personality which can lead to the rise of dictators as the people will accept and justify any behaviour from the leader of their tribe.
"democracy is bad because it can lead to dictatorship" can't be a serious argument...
Democracies are all flawed but theocracies, monarchies, oligarchies, &c. certainly aren't better when it comes to cult of personalities and serving their own tribes
By rightbyte 2025-05-2616:48 > "democracy is bad because it can lead to dictatorship" can't be a serious argument...
Heh you got a good point. People seem to expect way to much from their form of government and get desillusionized when it is not magic.
Like, join a party and see how the sausage is made.
By ndsipa_pomu 2025-05-2618:04 > "democracy is bad because it can lead to dictatorship" can't be a serious argument...
It's not and I didn't write, nor intend that.
Educated voters are a pre-condition for democracy and without that, democracy fails. It's similar to how market knowledge is a pre-condition of free markets as otherwise markets favour the biggest trader.
By hulitu 2025-05-265:21 > Democracy still is a good idea.
When they finnaly implement it. /s
By hoseja 2025-05-2611:08 Not with universal suffrage. And without it you need to aggresively curb revolutionary communist parasites.
By jackyinger 2025-05-2522:37 To the contrary, if voters are manipulated it is not a well functioning democracy. It is a farce of a democracy, the subtle manipulation just adds a veneer of legitimacy because it appears to be a democracy. Those who are manipulating people are the ones in power, not the citizens.
Edit: I say subtle in the sense that those being manipulated are not particularly aware of being manipulated.
By hoseja 2025-05-2611:07 The contest for the most efficient manipulation of the plebeians is where the elites are arbitraging their game nowadays. I suppose it's marginally better than constantly dying in their petty wars.
By AndrewKemendo 2025-05-261:06 I’m afraid your conclusion is correct
There has never been a representative democracy. Not in the US, not anywhere. So it’s impossible to say whether it’s a goal that’s with pursuit.
The idea that one ever existed is also a fairy tale to be clear. This is the most globally “representative” system ever, if for no other reason than for the existence of global mobility. Despite global border protection, if you’re determined enough you can get anywhere. Truly.
People will argue in a mealymouth way about whether any form of democracy is functional and “best of all bad systems” is typically the masters level refrain.
It’s worth thinking beyond 20th century concepts like states
By lm28469 2025-05-2612:48 It's simple really, democracy isn't democracy if the voters aren't well informed. Also democracy is a spectrum, the "benefits of democracy" is almost meaningless if you don't define what type of democracy you're talking about.
We quickly get into the "communism was never implemented properly" type of argument too. Sure a theoretical benevolent dictator might be better than a flawed democracy, the problem is that it never happens in real life
Just this week I finished reading The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the CIA, and The Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq. I highly recommend it if the subject interests you. Exhaustively researched, and it relies on some more recently released information from inside Saddam’s regime.
By e40 2025-05-2615:05 Can you give us a TLDR?
By stormfather 2025-05-2516:2421 reply I've never understood what the real reason we invaded was. I just know it wasn't what we said, or oil.
By dragonwriter 2025-05-2516:433 reply A US invasion, occupation, and political reformation of Iraq to serve as a lever for a pro-US series of regime changes in the Middle East were central ideas of the Project for a New American Century, from which the Bush Administration drew heavily for its defense and foreign policy officials (as well as VP.)
By somenameforme 2025-05-2517:193 reply This is 100% it, but this goes far beyond just Bush or Iraq. If you ever want to understand what's really happening in US geopolitics, their paper, Rebuilding America's Defenses [1], is critical reading. It describes every motivation, goal, and purpose with 0 effort to fluff it up for public. This absolutely transcends parties as well. It is the position of the US political establishment. For instance Robert Kagan is the founder of the Project for the New American Century and his wife is Victoria Nuland who served as deputy head of state under Biden.
It's not easy to give cliff notes, because there's too much to say. But in general, this was at the time when the USSR had still only relatively recently fallen and the US was not only essentially the king of the world, but had 0 meaningful competition for said claim. The goal of PNAC, and of the US political establishment, was to take this scenario, expand it, and perpetuate it. So the primary point was to prevent the rise of any other power and to essentially dominate the world primarily through being seen as the unquestioned premier military power, which would entail dramatic increases in military spending, regular demonstrations of power including preemptive and unilateral attacks on other countries if necessary, and so forth, wrapped in a tidy package of 'spreading democracy and freedom.'
Most famously they acknowledged that all of their goals would be quite difficult without, in their own words, something like a new Pearl Harbor: "Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor." 9/11 happened less than a year later, and everything went into overdrive, a trend that continued long after Bush was but a fading memory.
[1] - https://archive.org/details/RebuildingAmericasDefenses
I thought this was all history, but:
> Develop and deploy global MISSILE DEFENSES to defend the American homeland and American allies, and to provide a secure basis for U.S. power projection around the world.
> Control the new “international commons” of space and “cyberspace,” and pave the way for the creation of a new military service - U.S. Space Forces - with the mission of space control.
They really just kept at it, huh. Although this part is interesting:
> The Joint Strike Fighter, with limited capabilities and significant technical risk, is a roadblock to future transformation and a sink-hole for needed defense funds.
Wonder why it wasn't cancelled then? Change of mind, or just too many greased palms?
By looofooo0 2025-05-269:26 Meanwhile, they outsourced manufacturing to China, which is kind of insane. China builds 100x ships then the US. Add drones, steel, telecommunication, batteries, renewable to it...
By jazzyjackson 2025-05-270:28 Re: joint strike fighter: the money pit is essentially a subsidy for many sitting congressmens’ re election campaigns.
By MaxPock 2025-05-263:30 By HaZeust 2025-05-2521:22 Solid comment. The more I read into these geopolitical pretexts, the more I think the U.S. government didn't orchestrate 9/11 - but that they allowed it to happen.
By subpixel 2025-05-292:13 Also, there was palpable excitement in the media and everyone wanted to be a part of the big story.
I was in the offices of WNET/Channel 13 in Manhattan the day the news began moving among insiders that an invasion of Iraq was imminent. All these middle aged producers were stoked. If that was PBS you can only imagine what the vibe was like everywhere else.
Of course within a week people like this and their reporters were basically competing to get “embedded” with invading troops and tell an approved story. Wild times.
By rich_sasha 2025-05-2518:111 reply Methods aside, it is funny how quickly Republicans went from "we want to rule the whole world" to "we want nothing to do with the world and btw, foreigners get out".
Now they just want to annex Canada and Greenland, and hand over the US’s role in UN, WHO, and economic development to China.
How realistic is the idea of the U.S. annexing Canada, and what would that even look like in practice?
Is there any historical, legal, or strategic precedent that would make this even remotely feasible? And given the likely short political shelf life of the current U.S. administration, would any of this outlast the next four years anyway?
By michael1999 2025-05-2615:311 reply Recent history tells that once one moron US president decides to start an illegal war, both parties are happy to continue it for a couple of decades.
By michael1999 2025-05-2716:18 Iraq is a country: - with 45 million people - speaking languages other than english - a quarter of the way around the world - next to Iran and Turkey who could spoil US operations
And Bush still destroyed it with ease. The idea that the USA couldn't annex Canada by force is just silly.
We'd fight, and slit your throats in the dark. But there are some of us who'd just roll over, or welcome you with open arms. Just look at the morons in Alberta talking USA annexation -- they're probably 10% of the population. That's enough for a Quisling regime.
By ben_w 2025-05-2617:14 > How realistic is the idea of the U.S. annexing Canada, and what would that even look like in practice?
They've tried twice already, the second time the Canadians (/British at the time) burned down the White House: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_Washington
I mean, historical precedents for land grabs abound, but after the 1918 Wilson Doctrine (a US creation, btw) there is nothing. Colonialism is over and blatant imperialism doesn't work; we hold this as self-evident truth.
Then again, certain governments continue to act like we were still in the XIX century so "might makes right" (Russia, Israel, China, Morocco, Turkey...). If one is not ashamed to be in such an esteemed company, everything is possible.
By janalsncm 2025-05-268:17 Given that this is about the invasion of Iraq, I wouldn’t exclude the US from that list.
By brookst 2025-05-262:36 No, it’s all somewhere between bluster and fantasy. But it speaks to the US oligarchs’ mindset.
There were a few reasons but an important one is that Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Rumsfeld were convinced by Laurie Mylroie that Iraq really had something to do with 9/11 and everybody in the administration was paranoid about another attack. Wolfowitz also felt guilty about the George H. W. Bush administration abandoning the Shiites. All of them (except maybe Powell and Armitage) already disliked Iraq, felt like the first war was unfinished business, and didn't need much prodding to go after Saddam but the 9/11 connection they thought existed gave it urgency. Ultimately it came down to Bush and he probably thought it sounded like a good idea and not for any particular reason.
By michael1999 2025-05-2615:36 Cheney and Rumsfeld had a history of paranoid fantasies going back to their Team B fake "missile gap" work in the 70s.
Both of them knew how to work the DC machine, but neither of them were ever bothered by little things like "facts". I don't think we'll ever know what they really believed.
By 4ndrewl 2025-05-2517:26 Keystone for the Project for the New American Century. The problem is that the people who write this dross think they're in the same league as Plato or Hulme or Rousseau but they're barely above Sesame Street levels.
Project 2025 is this generation's equivalent and will be equally as successful.
There was the notion in certain (neo)conservative circles throughout the 90s that toppling Saddam really would be the trigger for a democratic wave throughout the middle east, kind of like an "Arab spring". This would benefit everyone in a kind of win-win situation: the US would have fewer enemies, and the people living there would benefit because freedom and democracy is good.
The "weapons of mass destruction" was kind of used as a pretext because they didn't believe such an argument would win popular support. It's somewhat abstract and rooted in a kind of ideology rather than pragmatism. They also genuinely believed that Saddam did have weapons of mass destructions, but just couldn't prove it. They would be found after invasion. Just a little white lie in the meanwhile.
That's really all there's to it. People get all cynical about "freedom and democracy", but that really was the goal, as a kind of "enlightened self-interest". After 9/11 this only became more acute: with the middle east part of the liberal hegemony, there would be no more Al-Qaeda (or they would be severely weakened).
Because they lied about the pretext, there was little to no broad discussion about any of this so they just operated in their ideological echo chamber. There was no one to really point out this entire notion was perhaps well-intentioned but also rather misguided and ignorant (to say nothing of the execution, which was profoundly misguided and ignorant).
But you see, this was a bigger crime than the invasion. Because it was ideologically driven on faith, no-one was looking at the actual facts. The US military could knock over Hussein, no problem, but no-one had any plan for what happened next. No state-building, not even a plan for how the civil service was going to work. Absolutely no plan to win over hearts and minds and not create the next generation of extremists. No-one checking prisoners were treated with respect.
The Iraq invasion was wrong, but the occupation was worse.
I'm just explaining what the thought process was that lead up to the invasion.
But yes, I broadly agree with you. Although I'm somewhat sceptical you can do this kind of state-building imposed from the outside in the first place though. But if you must do it, then the way the US went about it was clearly the wrong way.
By throw310822 2025-05-2522:33 > I'm just explaining what the thought process was that lead up to the invasion
Are you sure you explained the thought process, or you just explained the justifications and the propaganda in support for a plan that had different purposes? Because of course if you need to convince an entire country (including its politicians and intelligentsia) to start a war, handwaving things such as "democracy", "domino effect" and spreading fears about WMDs is an obvious strategy.
By const_cast 2025-05-263:01 The way you do it is covertly and from afar. You need the people to think they wanted their own revolution. It's what we do today and in the past across Africa. Soft-colonialism just works better.
Turns out, if you come in with guns and start making demands the people will hate you. And you need the people. The people aren't just the dudes living in a country - they are the country.
By moomin 2025-05-2517:36 I think your scepticism is justified. Reading about Germany invasion the 1950s suggests it didn’t go massively well there. But they didn’t even try.
By amanaplanacanal 2025-05-2517:34 If I remember right, Bush ran on the idea that the US should not do nation building. So I guess he was just being true to his values? Maybe he thought Iraq would self-organize into something better.
Just another example of hubris. Then he got re-elected, which still blows my mind.
By bongodongobob 2025-05-2517:10 No one actually thought or thinks that. It's about control of that region. All they want are figureheads that play nice with American business. That's always been the goal.
This sounds to good to be true. Neoconservatives pushing for freedom, democracy, enlightened self-interest? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
It's well documented. I'm not going to spend ages finding citations because this is a HN comment and not a scientific paper.
If you prefer to live in the psychological simplicity and safety of "neocons do evil because they're {evil,greedy,powerhungry,...}" or whatever then you're free to do so. But at that point you've also disqualified yourself from serious discussion.
By poncho_romero 2025-05-2517:311 reply They aren’t “evil” but the actions of the West in the Middle East have always been about capital despite being dressed up in the language of freedom and democracy. I would recommend the later parts of The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan for a broad overview of this dichotomy.
By mandmandam 2025-05-2522:551 reply > They aren’t “evil”
I'm not sure I understand this. If mass murder, propaganda, war crimes, atrocities, torture, money laundering, drug & people trafficking, etc aren't literally evil - just 'normal Western capital' stuff - then what do you call evil?
By poncho_romero 2025-05-2523:06 I don’t mean to come across as an apologist, what has been done and continues to happen is abhorrent. I prefer not to use terms like “good” and “evil” because they collapse so much complexity and nuance into emotionally charged terms. So when I say “they aren’t evil” I mean they didn’t commit these crimes against humanity because they’re akin to comic book villains, but rather because of ideology, humanity’s affinity for greed, etc.
By dragonwriter 2025-05-265:17 That those things are goals, and that they should be achieved through an aggressive interventionist foreign policy, are the defining pillars of neoconservatism.
Irak, with it's stable government, large population, large army inherited from the war with Iran, and natural resources, was a strong political player in the middle east, and not quite aligned with the USA (for instance, being able and willing to threaten its closer ally Israel).
So maybe the reason was just the desire to clip those wings?
By throw310822 2025-05-2522:381 reply It's such a coincidence that Israel is a prosperous (and very aggressive) country and all its neighbours either keep a very low profile or are reduced to rubble... By the US, and all for the sake of democracy of course.
By umbra07 2025-05-269:13 Lebanon and Jordan keep low profiles and/or rubble? And if you go beyond that, SA, Qatar, and the UAE keep low profiles and/or rubble?
Ego? Bush Jr trying to surpass his father isn’t particularly far fetched.
The signal war plans leak shows decisions for these kinds of things aren’t necessarily particularly well thought out.
IMO that's unlikely. For all his faults he doesn't seem particularly egotistical. He was more likely manipulated by Cheney and the MIC and probably as shell-shocked after 9/11 as the rest of us. Dumb war; dumber pretence; not a dick-measuring contest with his dad.
By Retric 2025-05-2520:40 I don’t think anyone runs for the presidency without a major ego, but we may disagree with what ego means.
By mycatisblack 2025-05-2516:29 I remember things sped up shortly after Saddam became vocal about having his oil paid in euros.
By motorest 2025-05-2516:45 > I've never understood what the real reason we invaded was.
Wikipedia has a pretty good summary.
By jokoon 2025-05-266:57 Maybe the war on terror required to have a foothold in the middle east.
The us was not going to invade Iran or Saudi Arabia. Fighting militias is difficult.
Having troops there allowed to get the enemy (jihadists) where it was, so troops would serve as a lightning rod.
Iraq was probably the place that was the easiest to invade without to many consequences, where nobody would cry about Saddam going away.
I'm trying to see what strategy it was, of course geopolitics are ugly.
By burnt-resistor 2025-05-266:55 W wanted "righteous revenge" for 9/11 and Cheney wanted profits from military contracts. Those were the most direct interests. (Phantom) WMDs, human rights, and oil were the other oblique excuses. Reaffirmation of the supremacy of American imperialism was another purpose. It lead to $10T of wasted treasure and 500k lives snuffed out for the egos and ambitions of foolish and crooked leaders.
By shrubble 2025-05-265:27 It's called the Oded Yinon Plan, or just the Yinon Plan - the idea is for a certain list of countries to be weakened, while assisting Israel in becoming a regional superpower (Israel will be militarily dominant by having a strong army and then weakening other countries' armies).
By mrkeen 2025-05-2516:43 Good polling perhaps? Bush lost the popular vote in 2000 (and allegedly the actual vote), but won in 2004.
Or maybe it was just Cheney's idea to funnel money to himself via Halliburton.
By washadjeffmad 2025-05-2522:45 You'd have to understand everything from a century before the formation of the Baath Party to how Saddam consolidated power in spite of global efforts to destabilize the people of the region for Western gain from WW1 until the 1980s.
He was both a horror and a blight on a long spanning intelligence effort that intersected with the storied history of Anglo interaction with the "Musselmen" empire.
Long story short, you can't without a Muslim perspective.
By xbmcuser 2025-05-2517:09 A large part of it was oil and keeping control on oil prices. People seem to forget that without the discovery of cheap way of fracking US would have required large amounts of oil to keep its economy growing and any kind of power in the region that could disrupt its oil supply had to be removed.
By Synaesthesia 2025-05-2516:521 reply It's imperialism. The US has traditionally dominated the Middle East region and it's big enemy is independence and nationalism. It wants countries that are willing to obey. So they made an example of a disobedient country, which may set an example for others if successful.
By jemmyw 2025-05-265:26 > The US has traditionally dominated the Middle East
Not really and not for long enough to say traditionally. It's way more traditional for the British and French to be poking their noses into the region.
By nova22033 2025-05-2523:13 My personal opinion: W thought it would be easy and there would be little to no cost.
By iJohnDoe 2025-05-2522:47 Cheney. Halliburton. Money for everyone involved. Bush and Cheney had to pay back the cronies that got them elected.
By ekianjo 2025-05-2516:46 The more wars the more special interest groups make money.
By ajb 2025-05-2615:53 Politicians were the first vibe coders.
By IncreasePosts 2025-05-2516:28 Saddam tried to kill g dub's daddy
By sjzizbxjzj 2025-05-2516:572 reply [flagged]
By like_any_other 2025-05-264:311 reply [flagged]
"Oh and look, the guy's a Jew! It all makes sense now!
Hey, why are people calling me anti-semitic?"
By like_any_other 2025-05-2611:241 reply You want me to pretend the state of Israel has nothing to do with Jews?
You implied that an American citizen was being unfaithful to the motherland, on the basis of him being a Jew.
By like_any_other 2025-05-2619:52 [flagged]
By MaxPock 2025-05-263:45 The removal of Saddam Hussein and the subsequent destabilization of Iraq can be seen as a highly successful strategic project—if viewed through the lens of geopolitical interests rather than official narratives.
It effectively eliminated Israel’s most significant regional threat and dismantled a key unifying figure for the Sunni Arab world.
Unlike other Sunni regimes that had largely aligned with American and Israeli interests, Saddam remained defiant.
The publicly stated reasons for the invasion—WMDs, democracy promotion, and anti-terrorism—were largely smokescreens meant to pacify public opinion, obscure the true motives, and keep people distracted and divided.
