Rachel Maddow’s postmortem of the second American invasion of Iraq goes through the purported justifications: 9/11, WMDs, democracy, etc.

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Chris Matthews goes over the discredited reasons, too. (He remains the only one who mentions the human cost to Iraq, though his “100,000″ casualties count is far less than the million–give or take a hundred 9/11s–estimated by others.)

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Quoting Matthews, from the above, addressing CFR’s Dan Senor (who is rephrasing the old neo-con lines):

I think very few other presidents would have taken us to war. I don’t even think Reagan would have taken us to war. It took a unique combination of a president who knew very little of foreign policy and lacked the philosophical base to fight with you guys and Dick Cheney, who wanted war in the worst way.

So what was the reason? Why was Iraq invaded? American progressives and the European left like to say that it was for oil. But Saddam was already selling dirt-cheap oil to us! When we tried to stop him, he spent more than a decade trying to sneakily sell oil to whoever was buying. He was put in power by us, and he had even asked our permission before invading Kuwait. So his oil was ours for all intents and purposes anyway!

Is the suggestion that Big Oil wanted him gone? That’s nonsense! Business seeks stability; the whole modus operandi of the American empire is to bully foreign countries into creating environments friendly to American business. Saddam was already on our side!

As for the question of Cheney’s motive, it has continued to remain unanswered–in fact, largely unaddressed! Even if we’d attempted to impeach the pulseless Darth Vader for an answer, he may have pulled a Pinochet on us!

Oil may win as an interim alibi. But the ones who steer and shape the intellectually challenged segments of the population will inevitably point out the obvious hole in the story. The pertinent question is: What will average people think the reason was, ten years from now? What will returning soldiers think to be the root cause of their disfigurements?

Hard-nosed analysis is neither an inclination nor comfortable territory for most people. Policy nuances will escape them. If an attempt to give them health insurance causes paranoid fears, what reasons will they find for this war? Even if we discount the lunatic fringe of the Birthers and the Deathers, one still has to keep in mind how easily misled a large chunk of the US populace was with respect to Iraq–and so how easily misleadable.