3 things to understand about Iraq War I that make Iraq War II make sense

1) it was the apex of Reagan’s renormalization of war after Vietnam

They called it curing the Vietnam Syndrome. Started small - Granada, which proved you couldn’t salami-slice us in the Caribbean, all the South American stuff that flew as “the Drug War” and was largely using our lessons-of-Nam (F-teen fighters, look-down AWACS and SIGINT, in-country trainers who know the local ways…) to reassert the Monroe Doctrine

Panama! You know Ronald Reagan made his foreign-policy name before presidency by denouncing the treaty that turned control of the canal over to the country we’d set up as a convenient fiction. It was like when Egypt claimed the Suez canal to choke off (with American subtle moneyman backing) the French and British empires! But we were doing it for free, for what, to sooth Jimmy Carter’s soul?

We didn’t even go to war, we arrested the head of state and put him in US prison. Who’s a convenient fiction? Who’s a convenient fiction still?

2) The Dems, especially the “Watergate class” of Nixon-backlash Democrats were ferociously opposed to Iraq I in large part because they saw 1). They warned of it like people warned of Iraq II - endless tarbaby trap that alienates everyone, flag-draped coffins, etc. The Republicans stuck by their pres and a segment of the newer, more professional, technocratic, post-hippie Atari Democrats backed it, incl. especially Al Gore

3) The war was a riotous success, international backing (we had tried to pretend the UN mattered for a decade after WWII before the Cold War took off, but it was social democratic bullshit and we (probably) had to shoot down Dag Hammarskjold’s plane when he threatened to take the equal sovereignty of post-colonial African states seriously, we tried again for another decade AFTER the Cold War), a quick in and out victory. The “Highway of Death” turkey shoot and all where we proved Air Power Can Too Win A War By Itself mightve been a pretext to war-crimes us but we won and were the only country that could project power a foot off its doorstop against opposition so