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After the Iraq fiasco, the key to continuing neocon power was two-fold: First, disappearing the disaster. Second disappearing the neocons themselves. The disaster was disappeared by a series of rationalizations and redefinitions, the most important of which was the replacement of the original rationale--9/11, WMDs and all that--with goal of "democratization" (which the US originally had no interest in), and the replacement of all else with the mantra, "the surge is working." Disappearing the neocons involved a rather extensive chameleon act, a key part of which was the erasure of their fingerprints all over everything in sight.
This is where we get the common bit of hegemonic narrative used to excuse the Iraq War, the claim that "everyone" believed the intelligence that Saddam had WMDs. This narrative is not just false, it's a textbook case of how hegemonic discourse makes it virtually impossible to think straight about anything. There's an old adage that if you ask the wrong questions, you can't get the right answers. Hegemonic discourse works best by making sure that nothing but wrong questions get asked.
By implicitly making the question, "did everyone believe Saddam had WMDs?"--and not even asking it, but simply asserting an answer, every question we ought to be asking is summarily swept off the table. And the chance of making a truly fundamental break with the neocon direction is substantially weakened. Following this narrative's indicated line, no one asks what we were doing attacking bin Laden's worst ideological enemy--or even Iran's. Much less what we're doing destabilizing an ethnically fragmented state in the middle of an already unstable region. Or why we chose to invade Iraq--which would surely inflame Arab opinion against us, while bolstering support for the terrorists who attacked us--rather than take advantage of an opening to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict, which no less than Colin Powell called promising. Looked at from any sort of sane geopolitical perspective, the invasion of Iraq was just plain nuts--so nuts that some have concluded that a permanently destabilized Middle East was precisely the point. I don't believe that, as it does not comport with previous neocon doctrine. Still, neocons love military conflict so much that even they seem to have forgotten what was supposed to be their original game-plan. Then there was the point-by-point abandonment of the Powell Doctrine--all the supposed lessons of Vietnam thrown out the window at the same time. And, of course, the two big ones. First, the little big one: (1) Why was Bush so obsessed about invading Iraq, and why was he so wrong? Then the big big one: (2) What the hell happened to going after those who attacked us on 9/11?
These are just some of the things we're not supposed to think about when encountering the narrative about "everyone" believing the intelligence that Saddam had WMDs. Okay, you might ask, then who didn't believe it? Well, how about the neocons in/and the Bush Administration itself, for starters?
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