[userulluipeste]

"Without 9/11 or something like it, there never would have been enough support for an invasion of Iraq to actually carry it out."

Why not? It happened before, how could it not happen again? Actually, seen from outside of U.S., the Iraq events that followed the reinstatement of the Bush family appear very naturally, those were like... family policy!

[mikeash]

Even with 9/11, there was massive public opposition to the invasion. However, 9/11 had caused a massive shift overall, resulting in much greater popular support for the government in general and the administration in particular, and it caused the Democrats to abdicate their role as the "loyal opposition" and instead become rubber stamps. Additionally, 9/11 was used to drum up a great deal of additional support for the invasion by painting it as part of the war on terror. I don't believe it was ever outright stated, but it was heavily implied that Iraq was partially responsible for 9/11, and that the invasion would prevent future attacks.

In a hypothetical world without 9/11, the Bush administration would still want to invade Iraq, no doubt. It's been shown that they started the project of figuring out how to do it well before. But I don't think they'd be able to pull it off. Public opposition would have been much greater, Congressional opposition would have actually happened, and I don't think they would have been able to steamroll over that, or even anywhere close.

Bush more or less came into office as a lame duck. He was the first president in living memory to have won the election while losing the popular vote. He was often thought of as a buffoon, and even his supporters, in my experience, supported him more out of team spirit than because they actually thought he was some brilliant leader. I believe that, in this environment, the default position on a proposed invasion of Iraq would have been a solid "no, why would you even want to do that?"

But mix in 9/11 and the following year and a half of terrorist-related paranoia and fighting, and a lot of people changed their minds to "yes, we must support our leaders in their glorious fight against the al Qaeda menace."