'Why Did We Invade Iraq' Is the World's Easiest Question to Answer

You can sum it up in literally one word!

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It’s 20 years since the Iraq War began, and apparently, what caused the United States to wage war on Iraq is still a complex puzzle, shrouded in mystery. At least, that’s according to a piece that ran over the weekend in the New York Times. In the piece—entitled “20 Years On, a Question Lingers About Iraq: Why Did the U.S. Invade?”—columnist Max Fisher attempts to unravel this supposedly tangled thread, mostly by talking to a bunch of fancy academics. Here’s a sample:

Was it really, as the George W. Bush administration claimed in the war’s run-up, to neutralize an active Iraqi arsenal of weapons of mass destruction that turned out to not exist?

Was it over, as the administration heavily implied, suspicions that Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s leader, had been involved in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which also proved false?

Was it to liberate Iraqis from Mr. Hussein’s rule and bring democracy to the Middle East, as the administration would later claim?

Oil? Faulty intelligence? Geopolitical gain? Simple overconfidence? Popular desire for a war, any war, to reclaim national pride? Or, as in conflicts like World War I, mutual miscommunication that sent distrustful states bumbling into conflict?

“I will go to my grave not knowing that. I can’t answer it,” Richard Haass, a senior State Department official at the time of the invasion, said in 2004 when asked why it had happened.

Fisher runs through all of these theories while citing a string of learned individuals, all of whom have ruminated on the possibilities. But by the end of the article, he is no surer than he was at the beginning:

No matter how much we know about the facts of the 2003 invasion, Dr. Saunders said, “some of it will remain fundamentally unknowable.”

It seems that we’ll never be able to answer this question. Fisher calls himself “The Interpreter,” but on the issue of Iraq, he appears to have interpreted himself right into nothingness.

Oooh! Ooh!!! Call on me! I know I’m not a “Georgetown University scholar” or a “U.S. Naval War College historian” or a “University of Toronto scholar” like some of the people Fisher mentions in his blog, but I think I can help him here! I think I have solved the big mystery of why the U.S. went to war. It’s actually contained in just one word that I feel like he will definitely have heard of.

Ready for the big reveal????? OK, here goes.