This was not about the senior Bush.  As an example of the preexisting plans concerning the Global War on Terror you can consider that the Patriot Act was ready to roll before 9/11.  The very influential Project for the New American Century, founded in 1997 by Irving Kristol and Robert Kagan, was advocating for stringent action against Iraq from its beginning.  They sought to transform the Middle Eastern Arab and Iranian states as entities unable to exert independent geopolitical will.

PNAC dovetailed with the Yinon Plan that was published in 1982 by Oded Yinon, a man who would become a prominent advisor of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.  The Yinon Plan was a strategy of destabilization to be used to bring about the territorial expansion of Israel into the borders of so called Greater Israel.  The Yinon Plan, like the Project for the New American Century, sought to create chaos in the states neighboring Israel through a means of direct action, indirect action, and surreptitious manipulations of internal politics. The Yinon Plan identified Iraq as the prime candidate for overturning of government.

The West's use for Iraq was as a check on the Islamic Republic of Iran and as a source of oil, after Iraq exhausted itself against Iran it was of no more use, and the oil could be obtained from other places.  Iraq then had lost its use to the West, and it's legacy rocket program posed a concern for Israel and the Gulf Arabs so it had become a problem.  One could imagine what political power a radicalized Fatah could have wielded if it had been boosted with Iraqi patronage in light of the power of Hamas and Hezbollah under Iranian patronage.  For the Bush Administration turning 9/11 into the Global War on Terror allowed them to progress efforts against Iraq, and arrogantly anticipated this would lead to easy action against Iran and Syria.  After Israel's 1981 Operation Opera strike on Iraq's nuclear facility, Iraq would never have had the ability to produce nuclear weapons in Saddam's lifespan, and it's chemical weapons program was dead after the First Gulf War.  The schizoid worries of those things were deliberately exaggerated because the figure of Saddam provided an inspiration of independence to other Arab countries, and specifically to the Palestinians.  Certainly, Saudi Arabia was happy to not have a strong Iraq next door, but all it's done is invite Iran into the vacuum to reassert its traditional role as hegemon of Mesopotamia.  ETA: We could also wonder what kind of geostrategic maneuvers Putin could have pulled off with an existent Baath Iraq in 2014, especially if he could have developed a peace accord between it and the Islamic Republic of Iran.

This is only tangentially related to the topic at hand but had Gaddafi been allowed to progress he would have developed a natural gas field in Libya's coastal waters, and his close economic ties with Italy would have allowed Italy to rank up its standing in the European Union as one of the major players.  Gaddafi's death was a consequence of the Invasion of Iraq, and as a consequence of his death Europe was flooded with huge numbers of North and Subsaharan Africans as invaders under the guise of refugees and welfare migrants.  ETA: Those developments were amenable to the both the World Economic Forum/Ehud Barak faction as well as the Neocon/Netanyahu faction of the West.

Getting rid of Saddam was worth it.  The 18 more years weren't.  We should have gone in, deposed him, gotten things semi-stable, and left.

If you're not taking over (like we did in Europe and Japan)  then they're of limited value.  At least the colonialists extracted some riches and left some remnants of their culture and governmental expertise.

It’s was a pointless endeavor. I lived for a year in Iraq as an advisor to former Baathist Iraqi Army officers. It was a very interesting experience, and the one thing it taught me is that Sadaam should’ve been left in power. Lots and lots of great young men and women lost with nothing of note gained.

Like it or not somebody has to stand up for the west when It's getting openly shat on by scumbags.

Invasion was righteous, then it turned into one catastrophic planning failure after another.

Righteous for what reason? None of the Iraqi ruling party had anything to do with 9/11. Literally nothing at all, and as I later found out, most of them were very against the idea of doing something like that.

Iraq had as much to do with 9/11 as Poland had to do with the Reichstag fire.

The only connection to 9/11 was a renewed concern for unresolved threats from actors who had already made it clear they'd like to hurt us.

Iraq would have likely armed or equipped a group like Bin Laden's in a heartbeat.

We should have gone in, done what needs to be done, and left immediately. The sticking around to rebuild everything we destroyed thing just isn't working for us.

I was in Afghanistan early.  I remember Iraq being brought up in April of 02 after one of our mission briefs.  I did the typical, "wait...what?!" double take to the person that mentioned it.  

I thought it wasn't a good choice back then with the limited information I had about the why, and after 15+ deployments, I still think it wasn't a righteous choice on our part.

The thing is though, the Ba’ath party in Iraq definitely did not want to re-live that rodeo they experienced in the early 90s. Because of that, Saddam and crew veered heavily from anyone wanting Sharia law. They saw the writing on the wall.

Read some of the official reasons for entering. Saddam openly shat on the U.S and Nato for a decade, the west basically lost all influence over the entire region (starting under Clinton) and we paid for it. Bush had to reestablish our influence, he really had no choice. Really it dates back to Carter.

It would not have just worked out on it's own. I don't understand why many conservatives seem to think that things that happen outside our borders will magically work themselves out.

You only saw what you were meant to see. The reality was a very different scenario. I too was brainwashed by the official narrative until I literally lived amongst these people on a day to day basis for an extended period of time.

Lol please don't tell me you're a war for oil retard.

What does all of this have to do with my post?  Next time don't quote me, just post your post on its own two legs.

What are you talking about? I’m a “no war” retard. Did you serve in Iraq in a position where you actually interacted on a daily basis for an extended period of time with high level former Ba’ath party officials and Anbar tribal sheikhs? I did, and I know what I am talking about.

Maybe he meant me.
I’m a war for oil type.
Iraq has what, like 15-20% of the oil in the Middle East?
Close to 10% of the oil in the world?
We should have kept it after going to the trouble of a war.

Then done the same to Venezuela.

And after those two examples told Canada they were now part of America, each province counts as a state, or they’d be getting the same treatment.  

Care to explain in what meaningful way? The Russians quit exporting aircraft repair parts and munitions to Iraq in 1992 and it grounded about 95% of Iraq’s air power by 2001. Iraq lost all of their French aircraft as they were evacuated to Iran in Desert Shield and seized. Iraq had no means of projecting power by 2003, not even to protect their own borders. They had hardly any useable artillery ammunition when the war kicked off in 2003. Many units were sent into battle with no ammunition in the invasion which is why they immediately surrendered. I personally interviewed a battery commander of a D-20 equipped unit who was sent to the front lines with 11 152mm shells for like 8 guns. He ordered his troops to depress the barrels to the ground, hoist the white flag, and wait to be captured. It was hopeless.

If they weren't Iranians then no you don't. Read Yeremyahus post at the top of the page, he seems to be in the know. Iraq was the low hanging fruit.

You have to start in the 70's and work up from there to even get a glimpse of the big picture, it's incredibly complex and I'm not really qualified to explain a 1/4 of it.

You said the Iraqi ruling party had anything to do with 9/11, as if implying it countered some official narrative.

Since then, you've repeated more disconnected stuff.

You say you were brainwashed by a narrative which you don't even seem to remember correctly.

A few trillion dollars out the door.  Money well spent?

It was NEOCON/Deep State bullshit, is what I said then and now.  FGB was a sock puppet for Rummmy, Chaney, Tennet.  The justification was a pack of lies and they tricked Powell into selling it.

As he said, it's like you think the world would have frozen at that moment.

And meeting a former regime guy in Iraq who actually supported fighting Americans is like meeting a German in 1946 that admitted to being a Nazi. Believing them? That's a different story.

Is Iraq invading anyone since? No, so yes it was worth it.

I said they had nothing to do with 9/11 and they didn’t. The narrative in 2003 was fear mongering to try to make people think the Iraqis posed an additional threat, specifically with WMDs. Sure, they had a few dated chemical weapons but nothing they could project and certainly nothing nuclear as was said.

No.

OPs answer: No.

Yes

Nope.

The Arab dictators kept a balance in that region for 40+ years. Now the real crazies are running the show.

I think the first part is understated. The GWOT was one of the first major deep state operations utilizing the President as the unwitting leader, in my opinion.

You said the Chinese and French were undermining them. How?

Not worth it for we the people, worth it for big gov/politicians.

Saddam was not a counterbalance to Iran. I was with the Elf 1 mission in 1985. Iran and Iraq were a huge destabilizing problem. We eliminated one-half of the problem. That was a bad on our part. We have a bad habit of not finishing the job.

The world could be very different today; all wars are banker wars, they profit the most have for the last 100 years.

It has been speculated that the bankers are the top tier puppet masters, they are the ones behind the WEF and the New World Order curtain.

That the massive profit from the post 9/11 wars including Iraq is what is funding the woke movement, mass immigration into the West, the control of the MSM, Hollywood, the corporate world, Western governments, the systematic destruction of the West and the ushering in of a global governance.

I’m out. That war, and all of the dead young men and women as a result, was perhaps the biggest mistake in the history of this country.

As others have also said the above pretty much sums up what I believe about it now.

I still haven’t come to terms with it. Or with the Afghanistan pullout. I know I have a lot of personal baggage I haven’t fully dealt with though. Hopefully someday day I’ll find clarity and can put it behind me.

It was worth it for the friends we made and the fun we had along the way.

Wow! That is a lot of fantasy there. Did you get that from a Wacko comic book?

I think it's interesting that most people seem to take as an axiom the absolute falsehood that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

A lot of people like to pretend that Iraq didn't gas the Kurds and cause a generational loss of life. Near genocide. But I guess some are probably too young to know that.

Those chemical weapons are weapons of mass destruction.

Waste of Blood and Treasure. But we had to get it on.

It's ironic this is the site I went to in 2004 to get the stories cnn wasn't reporting on, with people who were there finding a bunch of shit and posting pics and posting when they could.

Why?  FSH was an asshole, but we have left lots of asshole leaders alone.  FGHWB fucking gave FSH the green light to invade Kuwait. Our mandate was to push his forces out of Kuwait when that was done we were supposed to stop hostilities.  FWIW, I was there also