Re:A military exercise staged 35 years ago almost triggered ...
by arethuza on Tuesday November 27, 2018 @05:19AM
(#18541082)
I agree, definitely not random - it was sitting on the shelf waiting for someone to find an excuse to "do" it:
"Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable."
Milton Friedman
The idea of 'doing something' about Iraq was a lot older.
9/11 was just the excuse. When you read about the subject it's interesting to realize how many people in Washington was against that war, including the Pentagon and the State Department, but powerful interest prevailed.
From https://www.haaretz.com/1.4764706:
"Is the Iraq war the great neoconservative war? It's the war the neoconservatives wanted, Friedman says. It's the war the neoconservatives marketed. Those people had an idea to sell when September 11 came, and they sold it. Oh boy, did they sell it. So this is not a war that the masses demanded. This is a war of an elite. Friedman laughs: I could give you the names of 25 people (all of whom are at this moment within a five-block radius of this office) who, if you had exiled them to a desert island a year and a half ago, the Iraq war would not have happened. Still, it's not all that simple, Friedman retracts [..]"