What is Reddit's opinion of To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America into Iraq?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

> Russia really thought it was gonna be like America invading Iraq or something

I've been reading Robert Draper's book on the lead up the Iraq War and a lot of that actually sounds very much like what happened with Russia in Ukraine.

A leader and his close subordinates with a committed ideological view of how things are and how they will go with a bureaucratic and intelligence apparatus that is unwilling to challenge that view. Instead feeding in information that confirms what the leadership already thinks, based on intelligence from people with their own agendas, and despite having access to contrary indications.

this book is very well researched and will answer your question pretty definitively: https://www.amazon.com/Start-War-Bush-Administration-America/dp/0525561048

But the short answer is:

-bipartisan consensus was that Saddam was a bad dude an we'd be better off with him gone, but that wasn't enough for everyone to be convinced of war.

- Senior Bush admin officials' desire to go after Saddam fed CIA's tendencies to exaggerate their intel on WMDs and al qaeda/Saddam ties, which fed the desire to go to war further.

- Colin Powell, the British, and the MSM all getting on board the CIA's narrative helped convince the Dems that the narrative was true.

- Some Dems weren't sure, but in the hyper-patriotic/hyper-militaristic post-9/11 environment, nobody wanted to be seen as weak, so they went along with it.

It is vanishingly unlikely a Dem administration would have proactively went to war in Iraq. On the flip side, if Wolfowitz had a hard-on for going to war against a different country than Iraq, the Dems probably would have gone along with invading it too, didn't really matter, the political calculation was just cowardice - "everyone else seems convinced that we should do this, I'd better go along with it!"

Of course, this campaign was dead-on-arrival in 2004 because everyone had seen what happened when progressives voted third party in 2000.

Gore was a neolib who certainly would not have done anything about free college or the drug war. He probably would have also brought about the 2008 financial crisis, since the Clinton admin did a lot of the bank deregulation that laid the groundwork for it.

But he would not have invaded Iraq (please, before you reply to me talking about the AUMF vote in the Senate, please read a book about the political situation that led to that vote). And even more crucially, he was an advocate for climate and environmental policy in 2000, a year when there was still time to avert 2 degrees of warming through the sort of moderate proposals (carbon taxes, cap-and-trade, etc) that would not get the job done fast enough now.