The Iraq WMD rationale was chosen for bureaucratic consensus, not evidence.

Evidence

Deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz was one of the hawkish architects of the Iraq war. In an uncharacteristically frank interview with Vanity Fair, he explained that weapons of mass destruction were selected as the major justification for going to war with Iraq for bureaucratic reasons: … “The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the US government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason.” — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2314

Categorization

• XREF: Supports the vault’s existing claims about how harmful policy gets dressed in acceptable justifications; connects to Cooper’s social-conservatism signaling argument.
• SEED: Angle for an essay on how policy rationales are selected for coalition-building rather than truth, using Wolfowitz’s admission.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2314