It's actually true that 9/11 caused the invasion of Iraq. Not through any straightforward cause-and-effect relationship--Iraq didn't perpetrate the attacks, Iraq wasn't even involved. But nevertheless, America wouldn't have invaded Iraq had 9/11 not happened.

There are multiple paths from 9/11 to Iraq. The one I'm least proud of is the visceral bloodlust of a majority of Americans--"somebody's ass had to be kicked", as Success_Machine so succintly put it. In conversation after conversation with ordinary Americans--not the type who ponder issues and post on BBSes--the sentiment boiled down to "I don't give a rat's ass whether Iraq did or didn't have weapons of mass deee-struction, I don't really care how bad Saddam treated his people, maybe they're connected to Al Qaeda or mebbe they ain't...it just felt good to kill a bunch a' ragheads." Or, as my brother the psychologist put it more formally, it was a necessary catharsis. We needed to kill somebody, and Iraq was a convenient target.

There's a credible theory that we invaded Iraq as an object lesson. The Bush government wants America to be perceived as dangerous and thin-skinned, and willing to shed lots of foreign blood when we're pissed off. They consider the perception of America as a bully to be a positive thing. Invading Iraq was intended as a warning to the Middle East in particular to toe the American line or be invaded just like Iraq.

A related credible theory is that the invasion of Iraq advanced the geopolitical agenda of the neocons, which calls for what some people felt emboldened after 9/11 to call an "American Empire". It's more complicated than that, of course, but basically it's the plan set forth in Bush's National Security Policy paper from last summer: Ensure absolute military dominion over the Earth; preemptively attack anyone who might challenge us before they can achieve parity. The Middle East is one strategic cornerstone of this plan for hegemony, for obvious reasons.

We invaded Iraq for domestic political reasons. After the war in Afghanistan was declared over (prematurely, as we're beginning to discover) and Osama bin Laden seemed to have escaped, criticism began to arise. Bush needed something to "keep the momentum" (through November 2004) and defuse criticism of his failure to capture or kill ObL. A nice bloody war against Iraq was a natural choice for many reasons, of history, bad blood with the Bush family, a strategic location in the Middle East, and a dictator who barely needed any spin to be seen as worthy of a serious ass-kicking. All Bush had to add was a sense of imminent danger, and so they came up with the WMD story. Voila! Instant War!

So, you see Raoul, America didn't invade Iraq for no reason...just for an array of rather shabby reasons.

I hope you don't buy into the "us-versus-them" mentality of the Bush Regime and its fans. It's not universal here, and some Americans can understand the European point of view. We don't really live on two different planets--at times like these it's more like the Earth and the Moon, in good times a bit closer.