Death of Michael Ledeen, maker of the phony case for the invasion of Iraq

I've never understood what the real reason we invaded was. I just know it wasn't what we said, or oil.

A US invasion, occupation, and political reformation of Iraq to serve as a lever for a pro-US series of regime changes in the Middle East were central ideas of the Project for a New American Century, from which the Bush Administration drew heavily for its defense and foreign policy officials (as well as VP.)

This is 100% it, but this goes far beyond just Bush or Iraq. If you ever want to understand what's really happening in US geopolitics, their paper, Rebuilding America's Defenses [1], is critical reading. It describes every motivation, goal, and purpose with 0 effort to fluff it up for public. This absolutely transcends parties as well. It is the position of the US political establishment. For instance Robert Kagan is the founder of the Project for the New American Century and his wife is Victoria Nuland who served as deputy head of state under Biden.

It's not easy to give cliff notes, because there's too much to say. But in general, this was at the time when the USSR had still only relatively recently fallen and the US was not only essentially the king of the world, but had 0 meaningful competition for said claim. The goal of PNAC, and of the US political establishment, was to take this scenario, expand it, and perpetuate it. So the primary point was to prevent the rise of any other power and to essentially dominate the world primarily through being seen as the unquestioned premier military power, which would entail dramatic increases in military spending, regular demonstrations of power including preemptive and unilateral attacks on other countries if necessary, and so forth, wrapped in a tidy package of 'spreading democracy and freedom.'

Most famously they acknowledged that all of their goals would be quite difficult without, in their own words, something like a new Pearl Harbor: "Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor." 9/11 happened less than a year later, and everything went into overdrive, a trend that continued long after Bush was but a fading memory.

[1] - https://archive.org/details/RebuildingAmericasDefenses