But Why Iraq?

I've read the following quote from Steve Schmitt, here and here, and somewhere else I can no longer remember.

We're asking very traditional questions: Was information withheld? Was there
deceit about the information? Those are the familiar Watergate/Iran-contra
questions. But they overlook the Ideology of Information that the administration
created. By this I mean the whole practice of evaluating all information going
into the war not for its truth value, but for whether it promoted or hindered
the administration's goal of being free to go to war. The President could have
been given every bit of intelligence information available, and he and/or Cheney
would have reached the same decision because they would have discarded,
discounted, or disregarded most of it. Information that was Useful to that goal
was put in one box, Not Useful put in another. Entire categories of information
were assigned to the Not Useful box because their source was deemed an opponent
of U.S. military action, or assumed to have some other motive.

It's a great post, making explict what I think a lot us already implicitly understood but haven't clearly articulated.

But it also raises a very important question: if there was never an objective analysis that led to the decision to change the regime in Iraq at any point going back into the '90s, just WHY has this group been so dead set on the policy, a priori, for so long? For all the excellent reporting and explanations I've seen of the behavior of this administration and the neoconservative "cabal" that drove this war, unless I've missed it, no one, anywhere, has every explained just why this group decided in the mid-'90s that all of the national security eggs should go into the Iraq regime change basket.

Some will immediately say oil and Halliburton. I'm sure that's not unrelated, but I don't think, for all their problems, that's what really motivates guys like Bill Kristol and Paul Wolfowitz. And isn't there plenty of money to be made anyway building pipelines in Afghanistan and sucking up to the Saudis?

Was it a recognition that for national or parochial interests we needed to get our troops out of Saudi Arabia? Maybe, but wouldn't it be vastly easier to simply redeploy to Kuwait and react if Saddam started to threaten the Saudis again?

Was it that crazy RAND study that surfaced that saw this as the most convenient beginning of regime changes across the mideast? Maybe, but then why was it crucial to start with Iraq, not Syria, or Libya, or Sudan? For all of their documented hubris, did these very smart guys really believe, going back to the '90s, that they could pull off regime change across the middle east?

Here is my theory: a policy of regime change in Iraq was the only realistic way (if you could call that) that conservatives could hawkishly distinguish the Republican party and former cold war conservatives from Bill Clinton's already hawkish internationalist foreign policy. Here was one hawkish policy they could argue that they would do but Clinton would not- (after all, even they can't handle a war against Iran or North Korea, even though Clinton nearly did go to war with the North Koreans). Moreover, it also enabled them to rekindle and incorporate the time-honored conservative hostility to western Europe (who was softening on Iraq) and lump Clinton and the Democrats in with Western Europe as some how soft on security.

To say that this policy was based on political positioning and not any underlying objective analysis is pretty cynical. But isn't it pretty consistent with everything we've seen so far? As Steve Schmitt says, for these guys objective evidentiary support is just all backfill for what they already want to do. Haven't we heard before about this administration making policy choices in service of good politics that are subsequently justified however possible? Very much like the Bush tax cut that was devised in 1999 to beat Steve Forbes in the NH primary? Very much like what John D'Iulio and Paul O'Neill said about these guys?

And sadly, as you look at the 2002 and 2004 elections, didn't it work?