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definitely thought it would be a cake walk. No doubt about it. In fact, it pretty much was a cake walk until they got into the reconstruction phase. They didn't filter out the bad stuff. Not at all. They simply looked for what they wanted to see. At least as far as WMDs were concerned. About the going to war part, none of these guys have any expertise in the Middle East at all. Not Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Cheney etc. They knew little about that area of the world. But, what they did know was an ideology, especially Wolfowitz. He's a firm believer in promoting democracy and freedom and engaging in preemptive theater wars.
When you believe in an ideology it's not that you filter out the bad stuff, it's more like you know what you believe and you just stick with that, no matter what. That's why Wolfowitz and some of the other guys in the administration were putting forth some of Laurie Mylroie's theories about Iraq being involved in the first WTC terror attack etc. Wolfowitz was so bad that he didn't even know the number of casualties our troops suffered in Iraq. Its living in an echo chamber. Those bullshit stories weren't necessarily because they thought it would go bad, they just constantly do propaganda like that. At that time it was so early in the war they could get away with hyperpatriotism and propaganda efforts like that. It actually wasn't that nasty of a war, really, the reason it got nasty was because they did absolutely no planning for the aftermath they thought it would be so easy. They were so confident they assumed they could just jump up and utilize the old Iraqi ministries to set the country back up, but by the time General Garner even got there, the ministries were nonexistent. They literally had to go out and rebuild them in the most half-ass ways. I know this because my professor was in charge of rebuilding the foreign ministry in Iraq, he worked directly under Garner and Bremer. I've been published on the Project For A New American Century before.
If you go back and look at the work of Leo Strauss and his interpretation of Plato, and apply his ahistorical view to way guys like Wolfowitz, Bill Kristol and Richard Perle think, you'll see just how confident they are in the infallibility of their ideas and the use of power and propaganda to accomplish their goals. Now Cheney, he's a little different. He's a Neo-Con, but not really a true believer. He'd more or less knife his own mother in the back for a dollar. However, from an ideological standpoint, he was as dismissive of other points of view as anybody. For Cheney, not going to Baghdad after the first Gulf War has always been a sore point. Over time it became one with him. When Brent Scowcroft and others voiced dissent about going to the war, of course Cheney knew that and saw the intel. He just didn't care, because he didn't believe that would happen. He was getting info from Ahmed Chalabi and other sources that said different. That's what he chose to believe. Cheney's a delusional guy, a lot of this stems from the fervent belief that Ronald Reagan singlehandedly won the Cold War. This promotion of freedom, while utilizing aggressive rhetoric and combative tactics is a Neo-Con staple, it's why they prefer to be called Reaganites. To them the world is much simpler than how you or I or Poppy Bush or Brent Scowcroft or John Kerry may see it.
Poppy Bush, Jim Baker and Brent Scowcroft have Realist views of foreign policy. They see the world as anarchical, and believe the United States should only look out for it's own interests and power. Reaganites believe the U.S. is more of a hegemon and that we need to assert our place in the world. They also believe in the idea that history has come to an end. Meaning that liberal Democratic and free-market capitalist systems have won, and proven they are the best ideologies. They will blindly promote those systems and relish the idea at doing it, especially at gun point. Poppy Bush/Scowcroft/Baker may look at intel and make a decision on it's merit. A Neo-Con doesn't care, because his mind is already made up. It's ideological. The propaganda effort has nothing to do with whether they felt it was going to be a long war or not. That is all window dressing. What really mattered is the action itself, and that decision was made long before anything else was considered, be it intel, propaganda or whatever. They would have never attacked Iraq if they didn't believe it would be easy. Iraq was always the beginning step in the Neo-Con vision, precisely because it was considered a cakewalk. They didn't care what anybody else thought, nor did they really prepare for another scenario.
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