Quote Originally Posted by Ken White View Post
I'm aware the Admin said what you cite for public consumption. Do you personally think that any great number of the decision makers really put any stock in that? Do you think that had any significant place at all in the heirarchy of reasons for the attack?
Hard to tell. Ron Suskind, in The One Percent Doctrine, thinks they did. Personally I suspect that the President probably believed it. Some of his advisers may have been more coldly realistic, assuming that there was a political and psychological window of opportunity to remove a festering problem. I haven't been able to find any evidence, though, of a rigorous strategic assessment which weighed the potential risks and costs of military intervention against the expected utility.

I was always one of those who considered Hussein deterrable. He was prone to miscalculation, but that can be overcome through clarity of intent. More than anything, he valued his own survival and power. So long as we could hold those things as risk, he could be deterred.

The ONLY way the administration's argument held was if one or both of two things were true: 1) the costs and risks of removing Hussein by force were minimal; or 2) the future Saddam Hussein would be very different than the past Saddam Hussein and thus willing to risk his own survival and power in order to punish the United States.

Even before the intervention, I didn't see any reason to believe either of those.