The third of 20 excerpts from "Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq" by Thomas Ricks: By the time the public really focused on it, the decision to go to war had been made, though more through drift than through any one meeting. In September 2002, word began to circulate within the military than an invasion of Iraq was inevitable, and the march to war began.
At the heart of this part of the run-up to the war from the late summer of 2002 is the tale of how two contradictory delusions were persued and sold by the Bush administration. To make the case for war, administration officials tended to look at the worst-case scenarios for weapons of mass destruction, dismissing contrary evidence, asserting that Saddam Hussein possessed chemical and biological munitions and was on the road to getting nuclear weapons, and emphasizing the frightening possibility of his sharing them with terrorists to use against the United States. . . .
Yet at the same time, the administration's consideration of postwar issues took a leap of faith in the opposite direction, emphasizing best-case scenarios that assumed that Iraqis generally would greet the U.S. presence warmly and that a successor Iraqi government could be established quickly, permitting the swift homeward movement of most U.S. troops. In order to make this case, more pessimistic biews repeatedly had to be rejected and ignored, even if they came from area experts.
Both the pessimism of the threat assessment and the optimism of the postwar assessment helped pave the way to war. By overstating the threat of Iraq, the former made war seem more necessary. By understating the difficulty of remaking Iraq, the latter made it seem easier and less expensive than it would prove to be.© 2006, Thomas E. Ricks. All rights reserved.
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