[khokhol]

Attitudes towards the Iraq war changed massively during the presidency of George W Bush [1].

Sure it changed once they saw the (wholly predictable) actual reality of the war. But the fact that a solid majority supported the debacle at the outset, despite Bush's lies at the time being roughly on par with Putin's lies about Ukraine today (in terms of being transparently BS) -- does tend to support the point the above commenter is making.

[TeaBrain]

It didn't take years of little progress for the US public to become pessimistic about the Iraq War. The war had less than 50% approval only a year after starting. Also, contrary to what is commonly passed around as fact today, it was not abundantly clear that the Iraqi chemical weapons program no longer existed, as the US was never actually supplied with evidence that the Iraqi Biological Weapons program was done away with after the Gulf War, which is why it wasn't just the possible existence of WMDs that was given as justification, but the non-cooperation with inspectors also. In the early 2000s, soldiers were given multiple rounds of anthrax vaccine shots due to this lack of clarity. This is not to say that this justification a good reason, but it wasn't a clear lie at the time either, despite being repeated commonly as such on the internet these days.

https://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/29/us/the-2004-campaign-the-...

[fauigerzigerk]

Not at all. A majority of Americans changed their minds in opposition to the sitting president who had started the war. This directly contradicts the point the above commenter was making.

[khokhol]

Seems you're drifting away from the scope of the issue I was referring to.

And are basically talking about something else.

[fauigerzigerk]

I was only ever talking about a very narrow point that you apparently missed.

I'm not having a general Iraq war debate. Everything interesting has already been said about that.