It goes a little deeper than that, but you are on track. Cheney and the neo-Cons desperately wanted to gain the presidency and control of Congress to finally orchestrate disruption in the Middle East. He'd been a proponent of unprovoked invasion since serving in Nixon's Admin. George Sr. knew to contain Cheney and Rumsfeld with their constant cries to finish the job in Iraq.
So when the 2000 election campaign was gearing up, W approached Cheney to help vet a VP candidate. Cheney, knowing he could use W's weak-mindedness to his advantage, suggested he would serve as VP.
Once 9/11 hit, which was NOT orchestrated by the CIA or government as many conspiracy theorists assert, Cheney and the neo-Cons realized this was an opportunity to paint the entire Middle East with the same extremist brush as al-Queda. Normally, a rational president wouldn't unilaterally invade a sovereign nation unprovoked and on shaky data, but with Cheney and the neo-cons feeding him a bunch of aggressive data and with W's longstanding belief that Saddam needed to suffer for his attempt on Daddy's life, W just needed to get enough data to make his case and he'd be all for it. Hence, the miraculous discovery of the "Downing Street Memo." The author of which committed suicide once he realized the US was actually going to base the legitimacy of the invasion on his BS memo.
So there you have it, a political tragedy ripped right from the subtext of the Star Wars saga.
Unfortunately, the galactic sized gambled failed primarily due to a hastily conceived post-invasion plan, Rumsfeld's utter incompetence which Cheney was worried about from day 1 and the Congressional Republicans who spent like drunken lottery winners trying to distract their constituents from the growing problem brewing with their foreign policy.
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There are so many disparate reasons we went into Iraq, and this explanation is too simplistic. End result however is that we have a fairly stable Iraq and thousands of wannabe jihadists are now enjoying their virgin pigs. Just to go with your whole Star Wars/Darth Cheney theme though I will say this. I think one of the reasons they did what they did was to open a shooting gallery. They spread some bait (our soldiers), drew in the prey (jihadi aholes) and then let loose, way better to have them come to you than chasing their sheepballing butts all over the middle East. Although the loss of any soldier's life is a bad thing, the concentration of effort in one place likely saved more lives than it cost, we'll never know.
