Iraq War: Who Did It and Why?

Cheney - Bush - Rumsfeld Axis of Incompetence

Reasons: The Iraq War Was Planned before 9 / 11

[#Cheney], [#Rumsfeld], [#Wolfowitz] and [#Feith], and others that Cheney brought into the Bush administration signed the Founding Principles of [#PNAC] in 1997. A neoconservative think tank and lobbying group, it wrote to Clinton in 1998 to urge him toward eliminate Saddam. By early 2001, before 9/11, it published a plan for the invasion that closely resembled Rumsfeld's actual strategy. The DC office of the Jerusalem-based [#IASPS] had urged Israel to take Iraq as early as 1996, and it's key author David Wurmser publish a book on why the Iraq War would be good for the US and Israel in 1999 before becoming Dick Cheney's Middle East adviser.

Cheney    Bush

Selling the War

Rumsfeld was ready to "sweep it all up, related or not," on 9/11. Two days later, Wolfowitz called for "ending states that sponsor terrorism" and [#JINSA]  called for "regime change" in Iraq. By the end of the first week, they called a meeting of the Defense Policy Board, and  invited their Iraqi con-artist [#Chalabi]. By the end of that 19 hour meeting, they had reached concensus—invade Iraq whether or not it had anything to do with 9/11—exactly the neocon position for the previous four years.

Before the state of the union address, Cheney had convinced Bush. But to convince Congress they needed some reason besides Israel and oil. For reasons of government bureaucracy they settled on weapons of mass destruction.

Mission Accomplished (in 43 days)

Iraq War in Quotes

There are many good quotes:

• ""Five days or five months, but it certainly isn't going to last longer."  —Rumsfeld
• "My fellow Americans: Major combat operations in Iraq have ended."  —Bush
• "The Intelligence Community was dead wrong [about] weapons of mass destruction."    —The President's Commission

Dick Cheney's Iraq-War Clique: 

• [#PNAC] — Neoconservative think tank and lobby. Backed Iraqi regime change in 1998.
• [#IASPS] — "A Jerusalem-based think tank with an office in Washington, D.C." Lobbied Israel for Iraqi regime change in 1996.
• [#JINSA]  — The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. Backed Iraqi regime change on 9/13/2001.

The Cost of the Iraq War

Many costs of the war that are difficult to tack, but we know for sure the Congressional appropriations that are earmarked for the war. These total   ###