The invasion and occupation of Iraq was arguably the most consequential result of the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. 9/11 did not motivate the Iraqi invasion, for which the Bush administration had begun actively planning before the hijacked planes hit the Twin Towers. But it did create the political atmosphere needed to justify an unprovoked invasion.

Relying on the shattered sense of US invulnerability, the Bush administration argued for a so-called preventive attack on Iraq to stop Saddam Hussein’s alleged project to build “weapons of mass destruction” and use them against the United States in the near future — a project which was entirely mythological. National security advisor Condoleezza Rice eloquently and dishonestly encapsulated this tortured logic with a celebrated comment: “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, a growing cadre of political, economic, and social elites had been advocating for the United States to assume its rightful place as the hegemon in a “unipolar” world, and to exercise direct control over countries that challenged its leadership. For these imperialists — most visibly located in the national-security apparatus — and their media cheerleaders, Iraq was the lynchpin for reestablishing US control over the Middle East.