Marshall here. Welcome back to the Realignment.

What I'm describing here, Marshall, is that while September 11th has commonly been referred

to as a failure of the imagination, the Iraq War was the opposite. It was the imagination

to run a month. It was people imagining worst case scenarios that if we don't do this,

something awful is going to happen. And continually what we would hear in the ensuing months

as Bush began to be very explicit about what he believed was the Saddam threat.

Explicit to the American public, he would say, you can only imagine, we can only imagine

that Saddam would love to be involved in the next attack, hand over his weapons of mass

destruction to Al Qaeda and walk away without so much as a fingerprint. Every part of that

scenario is made up. He didn't have weapons, he didn't confederate with Al Qaeda, and

he didn't want to do a sin.

Hey everyone, I'm on a work vacation for a conference put on by the Hula Foundation,

one of the sponsors of the Realignment podcast. So because this week coincides with the

20th anniversary of the Iraq War, I'm going to repost our July 2021 interview with Robert

Draper about his book to start a war, how the Bush administration took America into a

Iraq. Obviously, it's been a bit of time since that conversation. There are all sorts

of things would have come up specifically how the path to war compares contrast with Russia's

decision to invade Ukraine in 2022. But it still has really, it's well and I cannot recommend

the book and Robert's broader writing enough hope you all enjoy the conversation and I will

note that so I'm going to have another realignment supercast subscriber exclusive episode coming

out on Friday. So be sure to subscribe at realignment dot supercast dot com to access to the full

episode and of course, to submit any questions you may have. See you all next time and a huge

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