They are opportunists, that don't plan what's going to happen. There were plenty of plans by the State Department to use and they ignored them. People are now saying they couldn't have lied because they would have been found out, so they musn't have lied.

So perhaps they thought they can lie and get found out and not get into trouble. People will think we wouldn't have done this so we won't get into trouble anyway. It's like the spoiled brat who gets away with everything because his parents think he wouldn't have done it. The more likely reason is that Chalabi and the INC fed them a lot of lies (and probably the Niger documents) to get them to invade. The CIA and others didn't believe that intelligence but Rumsfled and Cheney cherry picked it because they were sucked in by Chalabi. We know Chalabi lied because the WMD's aren't there.

The main point here though is the assumption that one of the goals of the invasion was to stay there and transform Iraq into a democracy. While a laudable goal there is plenty of evidence this was never the plan at all.

If it was, then why support Chalabi and the INC, as they weren't pro democratic. Chalabi is still wanted for bank fraud in Jordan. The idea as Cheney has said was to knock out Saddam, put Chalabi and the INC in place as another dictator and then make deals with him for base rights and presumably oil.

Since so much much was made of Russia and France losing its oil deals if the didn't support the invasion the natural conclusion to draw would be that the US would be taking over those contracts with the new government. This couldn't be done with a democracy because they could give the contracts to whoever they wanted. Also a democracy could say they didn't want any bases and they wanted to be a religious state like Iran.

The deal however went awry because the State Department refused to deal with Chalabi and wanted to make democracy in Iraq instead, and then Powell got on their side. This made Cheney furious and he said to Powell the government vacuum in Iraq wouldn't have happened if Chalabi hadn't been blocked.

So the whole idea to make Iraq a democracy was another lie, that was never the plan. When you think of the events just after the invasion, the INC and Chalabi were heavily backed by Bush to take over. For example they were showcased with the toppling of Saddam's statue.

So there became a squabble between Bush and the State Department which blocked Chalabi from taking power, and then they ended up having to make another kind of government instead. This morphed eventually into the current drive for democracy after it was clear the people hated Chalabi. He ended up on the governing council but couldn't dominate it.

If Cheney and Bush had their way Chalabi would have been in power within a few weeks after hostility ended and the democracy plans would have been shelved. No one in power really wants democracy for Iraq because the Shiites will just outvote everyone and probably put religious fundamentalists in power.

So democracy is not the plan, the idea is to make some kind of safeguards to stop the majority dominating the Sunnis and Kurds. Then a constitution was needed and the election put off, and of course the guerilla war started.

Now the plan seems to be to get out before the election to stop Bush getting voted out because of an ongoing war and the money to spent on reconstruction.