What happened?

The lead-up to the April, 2003, U.S. invasion of Iraq was a pretty frustrating time for me. It seemed obvious to me from the fall of 2002 that the Bush administration was consistently lying about everything, and was just itching to get at it regardless of whatever its stated reasons were. It boggled my mind that otherwise reasonable people were willing to give Bush, Cheney, Rice, Powell, etc., any credence at all. Why? Because very quickly a pattern emerged of a Bush admin official making a claim, and that claim being refuted or at least significantly "clarified" a day or two later by an independent source, such as Hans Blix, Mohammad El Baradei (International Atomic Energy Agency), former National Security Advisor under (G. H. W. Bush) Brent Scowcroft, centrifuge experts at Oak Ridge National Labs, the CIA itself, the head of Czech intelligence, etc. The easiest explanation for all these contradictions was that there was no evidence that Iraq was a threat to anyone, and that the Bush admin wanted to invade for reasons it was not telling the public. This is not that hard to put together, if you see all these news stories, and this is where sources become important. I was reading lefty sites which culled relevant stories from the worldwide English-speaking press, such as Truth Out and Common Dreams. In contrast, most people were reading headline news, which was dominated by eager support of adminstration talking points. For a discussion of how critical pieces were buried in the back pages by major papers, see the story Now They Tell Us in the New York Review of Books (link to non-NYRB site because NYRB now requires payment). At least this is the explanation I have for most people going along with the whole thing. More, related, thoughts later.