How did the United States Government lead its people to war?
The George Walker Bush administration devised a carefully-constructed mechanism to lead the United States. to war with Iraq, which began on March 19, 2003. First, they manufactured a problem, declaring that Iraq was a grave danger to the United States: • Arguing that Iraq was a threat to America and to the peace of the world, through its alleged arsenal of weapons of mass destruction and ties to terrorist networks. • Asserting there was a grave and growing danger from Iraq, thus there was an urgency to act. • Cultivating widespread anxiety by propagating fear stories about enemies seeking to do the American people great harm. • Demonizing Hussein as someone so evil and irrational that there was a moral imperative for action. Next, they had to dismiss other policy options that could have avoided war: • Arguing that containment – an effective strategy during the Cold War – couldn’t work with Iraq. • Attacking the efficacy of U.N. weapons inspections (which, ironically, had successfully d
