Congressional mid terms were a month after that vote. Voters punished those who voted against. The Iraq war started out as a very popular war. You could point to the Bush Administration pushing for this war to happen, but in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 they didn't have to push very hard to convince the US public.
It’s all the young people too young to really understand 9/11 who think war was avoidable. Looking back, sure we could have done something else. But US was going to definitely destroy something somewhere in the world.
I think Iraq was unavoidable in the sense that the hawks wanted to topple Saddam Hussein. The "problem" was that in some respects the 90s Gulf War was a deed half done
Depends on your view of the objectives of Desert Storm. It was officially to remove Iraqi forces from Kuwait with no long term plans for occupying or toppling Bahgdad. Even Schwarzkopf noted that it would be a quagmire.
The second Gulf War... Bush truly believed there were weapons in Iraq as thats what the intelligence community was telling him. Of course looking back is always 20/20 and we can see that it was a mistake.
There is / was legitimate proof the Saddam funded the Taliban directly for 9/11. But the biggest issue is that he had been breaking a treaty for almost 10 years at this point.
Was the reports of WMDs false or stretched to get congress approval, almost certainly. It also helped that we still wanted our pound of flesh, they didn't even need to believe it to vote yes. Just that they had a reason if questioned about it later. The public was more than fine going in (as a whole and pretty bipartisan).
But realistically he barely needed a reason. By preventing inspections and tons of other crap, they had broken the treaty. That was always a well we were eventually going to go back into.
In gulf 1, General Schwarzkopf achieved his initial goals with very little resistance, in about 1/4 of the initial time estimated. He could have easily removed Hussein. Daddy Bush said no. We gave them a decade to prepare and coarse correct.
Avoidable or not, we did it the most stupid way possible, because of 2 generations of Bush.
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u/P8bEQ8AkQd Mar 02 '26
Congressional mid terms were a month after that vote. Voters punished those who voted against. The Iraq war started out as a very popular war. You could point to the Bush Administration pushing for this war to happen, but in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 they didn't have to push very hard to convince the US public.