rb, if you can't remember what was being openly discussed four years ago, I can't help you.
I'll put this really simply: the idea was that there is some severe pathology in the Muslim world, particularly in the Arab world. That pathology was what led to 9/11. The boil had to be lanced. There was a very bad actor who was actually shooting at people, had invaded his neighbors, gassed his citizens, and refused to comply with UN ceasefire resolutions for a decade. He was a good candidate to be taken down and an example of civil society put into its place - the idea being that you'd only need to use force once, that once the momentum of healing the pathology took hold, it would spread.
Surely you remember all that? It wasn't kept secret. The president pretty much said so.
And as I said, in hindsight the mistake was not following the Powell Doctrine. The rest is history. But there is no mystery about why 9/11 led to the invasion of Iraq.
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