Why did so many Americans - especially self-described "conservatives" - support the retarded and disastrous Iraq war back in 2003? I was too young back then to care about politics. But when I see a "conservative" in the US above 35 or so, I can't help but think, "You probably supported invading Iraq, which means your political judgment is retarded."
Am I wrong to think that? My current politics are pretty strongly isolationist/nationalist.
Americans are retarded
They dropped the petrodollar. Empires must be maintained, puppets must hold their strings.
I supported the Iraq war in 2003 because i wanted dead muslims
i got it
Excepting yourself, of course
As so called "leaders of the free world", when some new dictatorship shows up we feel guilty about doing nothing.
On top of that, half of Europe and the UN are practically begging us to fight "just wars" around the world.
Everyone wants to feel like the good guy destroying evil. Sometimes you have to let evil fester somewhere.
Of course
americans are brainwashed into thinking politics is just a never ending football game between two (and only two) political parties, so you root for your team when they destabilize the middle east for israel but root against the enemy team when they destabilize the middle east for israel
Muh WMDs. Guess what Assad is being accused of now? Das rite.
That can be done for a lot cheaper than $3 trillion. When I looked up stuff about the 2000 presidential campaign, I was kind of astonished to find that Bush actually pledged to ELIMINATE the national debt by the 2010 budget cycle, which Bill Clinton had also predicted.
Instead, the Boomer motherfucker doubled it, and then Obama doubled it again.
Iraq was one link in an enormous chain of incompetence and irresponsibility by our "leaders" in the '00's and '10's.
And I wonder - why the FUCK didn't conservatives stop any of this? Why didn't they put pressure on Bush to live up to his damn promises with regard to things like the national debt and the budget?
9/11
ebin
how's your system doing
if you were too young to have an opinion then then you are still too young for your opinion to matter
People make that claim, but it doesn't make sense. How many of the fucking hijackers were even Iraqi?
Even a retard should have seen through that level of propaganda.
it was the shock of 9/11 I think
people didn't know not to trust the media at face value at the time- there was no internet.
American conservatives are fundamentally pro-war, even most Trump supporters. They dropped the facade now that Trump bombed Syria. Looking back, they only criticized Obama because they thought that he didn't bomb enough. They usually pointed to Trump's economic rhetoric rather than pointing to the fact that they disagreed with his temporary anti-regime change policies
Normally that would be true, but considering that the generation before me blew trillions on something as retarded as the Iraq war while the nation collapsed demographically, I'm not so sure.
yeah you're right
we all know the Iraq war was a mistake
but shit did it generate butthurt beyond belief LAMAO
I'm old enough to remember it.
Both sides were for it, yeah, democrats and republicans. The media supported it. It was a done deal because it was pushed, just like the Kosovo war and Gulf war.
There was a small vocal minority against it, which included Trump. They ended up being right.
Then the dems flipped and went full blown anti war, even demanding we just leave Iraq defenseless, which the Saudi donors probably wanted. Luckily the neocon war profiteers wanted to stay and actually win so they could make more money, they had more sway than the saudi donors.
>Even a retard should have seen through that level of propaganda
You really underestimate the average joe's ignorance. For a lot of people iraq="insert x"-istan
mainstream conservatives standing with the Republican president at the time was a big factor in broader support for the war among Conservatives. also, jingoistic patriotism - "my country, right or wrong" - certainly played a part.
9/11
Do you seriously not know this? Doesn't matter if Iraq had nothing to do with it, people were so rallied after 9/11, they could have initiated a conflict in Disney World and people would have supported it.
This. Americans went rabid after 9-11 and were out for blood, didn't matter whose.
eporters not holding the administration's claims that Saddam was in cahoots with Osama bin Laden and had restarted his WMD programs up again to close enough scrutiny
you have to understand how much people were basically sold a war that the administration knew was false, and even I as someone who opposed that war from the start and was never convinced by the claims that had been made to make the case for it, I had the lingering feeling:
>what if there's a legitimate reason, but they can't say why? maybe it'll all become clear in hindsight
and then they invaded and NOPE they just lied to get into an unnecessary war.
the power of their propaganda was enough to cast doubt on even someone who had no reason to support the administration at all in this retarded endeavor. what do you think the conservatives (other than small-state libertarian types) thought, when it was "our guy" selling the war, and trying to make it seem like a felt necessity instead of a war of convenience?