When was the decision to invade iraq made

The public justifications for the invasion were nothing but pretexts, and falsified pretexts at that. This is blunter than I usually sound. Why am I putting it this way? When the telephones started working again that afternoon, I called my children and parents, and my then-editors at The Atlantic, Michael Kelly and Cullen Murphy. After that, the very next call I made was to a friend who was working inside the Pentagon when it was hit, and had already been mobilized into a team planning the U.

My friend was being honest in expressing his own preferences: He viewed Saddam Hussein as the basic source of instability in the region. But he made clear that even if he personally had felt otherwise, Iraq was where things were already headed.

Soon after that meeting, rumors emerged of what is by now settled historical fact : that Paul Wolfowitz, with the apparent backing of Donald Rumsfeld, spoke strongly for invading Iraq along with, or instead of, fighting in Afghanistan. For an academic paper involving the meeting, see this. The principals voted against moving into Iraq immediately.

But from that point on it was a matter of how and when the Iraq front would open up, not whether. By late February, , our editors were basing our coverage plans on the certainty of the coming war. Withal he was not the only one. Rumsfeld and the OSP also served such a function. It filtered unwanted information and fed desired policy to the White House.

By pressuring their peers and their subordinates, mind guards made sure that the flow information was under their control. The OSP and the hawks carefully screened the information going into the White House before it was brought up for discussion both internally or in the media.

None of these assertions would have been made without mind guards McQueen ; Houghton As shown above, the criteria and symptoms are clearly evident in the case of Iraq.

Yet, this does not necessarily lend credit to the groupthink model. Because groupthink is an explanatory theory, unfit to make predictions, the model gains nothing from proving the existence of symptoms. That being said, analysis made by Badie, McQueen, Houghton and Kaufmann indicates the clear presence of many of the indicators of groupthink. The importance of each of the antecedents and symptoms varies with each of the authors. However, they all support the value of the model in framing and explaining the case of Iraq.

Despite not completely fulfilling the criteria of cohesiveness and homogeneity, the strong evidence of the rest conditions demonstrates that the model is not only useful, but also accurate in this instance.

The conclusion is twofold. First, there were certainly serious errors of judgement, which consequently led to a failure in important decision-making. Secretary Rumsfeld famously said that in policymaking there are unknown knowns, things you think you know that it turns out you did not Morris Information was buried, manufactured and selectively gathered to lead to a desired and politically convenient conclusion. The choices and decisions that were made ultimately led to a foreign policy failure.

The second point to be made is that there are clear indications that the decision making process was influenced by groupthink, which ultimately, and predictably, led to a poor outcome. The Janis model of groupthink held up against empirical testing in this case. Yet, the model is not broad enough, and cannot be universally applied or unequivocally endorsed.

That being said, the model offers a useful vocabulary and frame to better understand the intricate workings of the White House in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq. Coblitz, David, The Quotations Page. Dionne, E. New York: Random House. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hersh, Seymour M. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Albany: State of New York Press. New York: Penguin Press. Rumsfeld, Donald, The Quotations Page. Sunstein, C. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. The Guardian online. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Michigan: University of Michigan Press. New York: HarperCollins.

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This content was originally written for an undergraduate or Master's program. It is published as part of our mission to showcase peer-leading papers written by students during their studies. Image by C. But along with his misplaced single-mindedness, Bush also had what seemed an utter lack of inquisitiveness. The question was debated just a week before the invasion at two National Security Council meetings, with Bush, his cabinet secretaries, and top military officers present.

Several US officers were already circulating brochures urging Iraqi soldiers and commanders to stay in place after the invasion, so they could restore order. But in mid-May, with Saddam overthrown and on the run, L. The first barred all Baath Party members from holding political positions; the second disbanded the Iraqi army.

Bremer announced he was implementing the orders on a video link to an NSC meeting; it was the first that most of those in the room had heard of them. This was the most consequential act of the war, next to the invasion itself.

With its armed forces thrown out of work but their access to weapons intact, an armed rebellion was inevitable. The genesis of these orders is, even now, not clear. Draper repeats the standard line that the documents were written by Doug Feith and a Pentagon colleague, Walt Slocombe; and that Feith handed the papers to Bremer, telling him to declare them as policy upon arrival in Baghdad. But Feith and Slocombe were midlevel officials, lacking the authority or the nerve to override a presidential decision.

Who told them what to write, and who assured them that it was fine to pass the orders on to Bremer? This oversight is surprising, since Draper, like most chroniclers of the war, points to Chalabi as a clear villain in many other parts of the story. After Saddam fled, Wolfowitz, on his own initiative, arranged for a military plane to fly the so-called leaders of the FIF to Baghdad; they vanished upon arrival.

Did the orders come from Wolfowitz, Libby, or possibly Cheney? Saddam had no WMD s; the Iraqi weapons programs had been abandoned years before. But Bush told him to stay. Draper leaves a few mysteries unsolved. He also oversimplifies Rumsfeld, presenting him as a man of no serious ideas. Rumsfeld was particularly influenced on the matter by a veteran Pentagon official named Andrew Marshall, an intellectual Svengali of bureaucratic politics, who goes unmentioned in this book.

But these are quibbles. He makes it inescapably clear that the war was no mere well-intentioned tragedy but rather a sequence of deceptions and duplicities that could have been halted at several points along the way, before it led to the hideous disfiguring of American foreign policy and its image in the world for many years to come.

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