When would GWB invade Iraq without 9/11?

As the tin says, assuming 9/11 doesn't happen as in OTL, when would GWB invade Iraq? What would US politics look like for the War in Iraq without 9/11 happening beforehand? What if a 9/11 style event happens after the invasion of Iraq, does GWB get the blame unlike in OTL?
 
This is rather tricky. You will need to look into Cheney, Rumsfeld, and others. I believe that Bush did, genuinely, believe there were WMDs, both due to suspicious activities on behalf of Saddam and due to intelligence reports. What you need here is to stop the people who are faking them. Or perhaps have some way for the media to pick up on some of the problems. There was a bit of a mob mentality with the media about WMDs. Big, flashy, great for getting viewers. And Bush... his mentality would likely be different without 9-11. He may well have just went the Clinton route and bomb Iraq without war.
 

nbcman

Donor
This is rather tricky. You will need to look into Cheney, Rumsfeld, and others. I believe that Bush did, genuinely, believe there were WMDs, both due to suspicious activities on behalf of Saddam and due to intelligence reports. What you need here is to stop the people who are faking them. Or perhaps have some way for the media to pick up on some of the problems. There was a bit of a mob mentality with the media about WMDs. Big, flashy, great for getting viewers. And Bush... his mentality would likely be different without 9-11. He may well have just went the Clinton route and bomb Iraq without war.

+1 to this. The bombing may lead to an invasion of Iraq if there are US casualties during the bombing campaign or if there are commando / terrorist actions against US bases or vessels that are involved in the bombing campaign.
 
Pre election team Bush had presented a more isolationist line. Remember "No nation building" from the election campaign? The Republicans had dissed Clinton & Democrats in general on foreign policy & gained traction in the election with promises of priority to domestic issues & economy.

How honest those election policy promises were I can't say. A close look at the team Bush agenda between the election and 9/11 might give some clues.
 

CaliGuy

Banned
As the tin says, assuming 9/11 doesn't happen as in OTL, when would GWB invade Iraq? What would US politics look like for the War in Iraq without 9/11 happening beforehand? What if a 9/11 style event happens after the invasion of Iraq, does GWB get the blame unlike in OTL?
I doubt that the U.S. would have invaded Iraq in this TL; indeed, I simply don't think that the U.S. Congress would have felt the same sense of urgency in regards to Iraq as it felt after 9/11 in our TL.

However, Bush and his administration might try to assassinate Saddam Hussein and his sons in this TL.
 

raharris1973

Gone Fishin'
Donor
Monthly Donor
Agreed- they may have come to "want" to invade Iraq, but that wouldn't make it politically possible without 9/11 and the emotional/paraadigm shift it caused.
 
This is rather tricky. You will need to look into Cheney, Rumsfeld, and others. I believe that Bush did, genuinely, believe there were WMDs, both due to suspicious activities on behalf of Saddam and due to intelligence reports. What you need here is to stop the people who are faking them. Or perhaps have some way for the media to pick up on some of the problems. There was a bit of a mob mentality with the media about WMDs. Big, flashy, great for getting viewers. And Bush... his mentality would likely be different without 9-11. He may well have just went the Clinton route and bomb Iraq without war.
tbph, it was a reasonable guess that Saddam had WMDs because he'd used them before: the chemical weapons that he used against the Kurds. not nukes like probably alot of people thought, but poison gas and the like.
 
tbph, it was a reasonable guess that Saddam had WMDs because he'd used them before: the chemical weapons that he used against the Kurds. not nukes like probably alot of people thought, but poison gas and the like.

Saddam pulled out the weapons inspectors in 1998 which were mandated by the Gulf War cease fire. Both parties and US Intelligence believed it was to reconstitute his weapons program. That year you had the Iraq Liberation Act by Congress making regime change the official policy of the US and an air campaign Operation Desert Fox to smash his suspected development sites.

Clinton was thinking of a bigger air campaign to weaken the regime, but without Congressional buy in wasn’t going to do more then drop bombs.

Bush made a humble foreign policy part of his platform, but he was as hawkish as Gore on Iraq during the election. The US was bombing Iraq the first month Bush was in office as part of the NFZ cat and mouse game, but another ground war wasn’t happening under Bush without Congressional backing with solid buy in from Democrats not just Republicans.
 

raharris1973

Gone Fishin'
Donor
Monthly Donor
A teacher I had in the 1990s really hated the term WMDs, because it blurred the lines between massively destructive weapons like nukes, much less destructive but very cruel weapons like chemicals and unproven, unexperienced, difficult to weaponize weapons like bio.

Now it's understandable though why that catchall term was employed. In the 1991 Persian Gulf War the U.S. was not fearing Iraqi nukes but wanted to deter Iraqi chemical weapons use, and so we kind of kicked chemicals up to the same level so that we could implicitly threaten, you go chemical, we go nuclear.
 
A teacher I had in the 1990s really hated the term WMDs, because it blurred the lines between massively destructive weapons like nukes, much less destructive but very cruel weapons like chemicals and unproven, unexperienced, difficult to weaponize weapons like bio.

Now it's understandable though why that catchall term was employed. In the 1991 Persian Gulf War the U.S. was not fearing Iraqi nukes but wanted to deter Iraqi chemical weapons use, and so we kind of kicked chemicals up to the same level so that we could implicitly threaten, you go chemical, we go nuclear.
it could be argued that chemical weapons are actually worse than nukes in some ways: if you get hit by a nuke then that's the end of it, you're dead and your suffering has ended. if you get hit by a poison gas attack, though, you'll be writhing in agony for several minutes at least, and if you somehow get out of it then you'll be suffering for alot longer than the instantaneous death of being in an atomic fireball. of course, a similar argument could be made regarding nukes thanks to radiation poisoning and the like.

probably everyone in this thread knows this already, but i'd also just like to toss out that the "you go chemical, we go nuclear" argument is implicitly why Syria has its own huge amounts of chemical weapons--it's their own deterrent against nuclear-armed Israel, a modern M.A.D.
 
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