What are we doing in Iraq?

[glatt]

Originally Posted by Happy Monkey

Well, it's been out in the open on the PNAC website since Clinton was in office, and the PNAC members populated Bush's administration extensively. But they never explicitly acknowledged it, AFAIK. Possibly in part due to Bush's campaign derision of "nation building".

In hindsight we can maybe connect the dots a bit, but at the time the nation was headed for war, I don't recall a single person talking about building a pro-democracy country in the middle of the region as a base for our troops.