[andyfox]

It may well be that the Bush administration believed Chalabi's fantasies and that, indeed, we could bring about an Edenic Iraq in a couple of years and all would be either forgiven or forgotten about teh reasons promulgated for going in there in the first place. Certainly the administration's willful ignoring of the advice of experts both within and outside the government on what would happen in the wake of the occupation give substance to the claim that they felt we could remake the country in our image in relatively short order.

There is also the sense that the administration didn't care about counter-arguments, the important thing was going in there and getting rid of Hussein and everything else be damned. Certainly key members of the administration had been calling for regime change in Iraq long before 9/11. So they needed excuses to go in. 9/11 and the possibility of another 9/11 provided them.

I'm still amazed that people find it incredible that the government could have lied about this. EVERY GOVERNMENT LIES WHEN IT GOES TO WAR. The incredible thing would have been if they didn't lie. The issues are always framed in terms of good and evil, with the good, by definition, being our side, and the evil the other side.