The Iraq war & surrounding debate was a formative political experience for me, so I have lots of thoughts/memories/opinions about it.

I agree with the basic account: shocking events (especially 9/11) gave a source of power (the White House) a lot of freedom of action, they made some bad choices about to do with that freedom of action (in part influenced by the shocking events), and other potential sources of power (e.g. US public opinion, the Senate, the UN) which could have interfered were disinclined to (which is basically what it means for one source of power to have a lot of freedom of action).

So probably the most important takeaway is that it's important who is in positions of power which might get lots of freedom of action depending on what events take place, what ideas & ability to execute effectively they have, and what views they will have after the key events have happened (as they have reactions to those events and reason to focus on the topic, pay attention to others' views on it, and think about it themselves).

To go into more detail:

The national mood in the US after 9/11 (and then the DC snipers and anthrax attacks) was that the world is a dangerous place, and we need to rally together to keep ourselves safe, and trust the president to do what's necessary to keep us safe. 9/11 was the big traumatic event, but the set of 3 attacks made a trend and heightened the sense that future attacks could happen to anyone anywhere at any time (as the DC snipers did) and could be technologically sophisticated (as the anthrax attacks were) and kill lots of people. That gave the Bush administration a ton of freedom of action to choose what to do, especially for things like starting wars to keep America safe from terrorism.

Why did George W. Bush choose war? My sense (in line with this article) is that Bush was a 'big picture' kind of guy who wasn't inclined to think through the nuts & bolts of 'what is this going to accomplish' and 'how else might this course of action turn out, besides going the way we want it to'. He tended to latch onto a broad narrative, and in the wake of 9/11 a narrative he found appealing was of himself as a wartime leader, fighting for freedom & democracy against terror & bad guys. The Afghanistan war on its own wasn't enough to support this narrative so they were looking for other things to do, and Saddam Hussein was the obvious next bad guy sitting around, someone who we had unfinished business with. That Scholar's Stage article claims (and I find it plausible) that there wasn't actually much focused discussion within the administration about whether it was a good idea to go to war with Iraq.

The faction within the administration that had already been pushing for war with Iraq was a big part of what made Iraq the obvious next target, but that wasn't the whole story. As the Scholar's Stage article discusses, some people pushing for the war in 2002 had been part of the previous Iraq war in 1991, where they'd decided that it was imprudent to remove Saddam Hussein from power, and hadn't openly changed their minds and been pushing for war in the interim. 

Two of the main potential barriers to the White House's freedom of action in choosing to go to war in Iraq were getting approval from Congress and the United Nations. I think that the zeitgeist of trusting the president to keep us safe played a huge role in getting Congress's approval, and a weaker variant of that zeitgeist combined with American power helped with (effectively) getting UN approval. It also helped that both happened before the weapons inspectors were allowed back into Iraq. The case for war looked weaker after the weapons inspectors were allowed in and didn't find signs of the alleged WMD programs, but by that point there was a lot of momentum towards war and the Bush administration had already gotten the authority they needed. France had pushed back on giving that authority through the UN - they wanted a two-resolution plan where first the UN would demand that Iraq let weapons inspectors in, and then after the weapons inspections the UN would reconsider whether to authorize war - and wound up reaching a compromise with the US where they made the wording of the first UN resolution ambiguous so that the US could say that the resolution authorized the war without requiring a second resolution and France could say that they hadn't supported that. (This is the dispute that led to french fries being called "freedom fries" and the phrase "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" surging in popularity.)

I also have a lot of thoughts about the Iraq war debate, since that is what I was most immersed in at the time, though in hindsight a lot of that seems mostly epiphenomenal. This is more of a thought dump & less focused, but I'll share anyways since some of the details & texture seem relevant:

The Bush administration's public case for the war was more like a marketing campaign than part of a public debate over what to do. They talked a lot about how bad Saddam Hussein was (often citing stuff he'd done in the 1980s); this could be used as part of a coherent argument (and therefore he is likely to do such-and-such) but often it was just presented as an emotionally resonant argument fragment - a suggestive fact which felt like it fit with being in favor of a war to remove him from power. There were lots of mentions of 9/11 and terrorism in the context of talking about Iraq & Saddam Hussein; they weren't explicitly claiming that Hussein had contributed to the 9/11 attack but they did manage to leave a majority of the US believing that he had been involved in 9/11 according to polls at the time. There was also a lot of talk about WMDs, some of it referencing intelligence that turned out to be inaccurate about Iraq's weapons programs (especially chemical & biological), but much of it framed more like 'it would be bad if Saddam Hussein got nuclear weapons' (but rhetorically punchier) or using sleight of hand with the term "WMD" to basically say 'we have evidence that Iraq has banned chemical weapons programs, and it would be bad if they had nukes'.

There was something more like an actual debate over whether it was a good idea to go to war with Iraq (the Slate dialogue archived here, beginning with this article, provides a pretty good snapshot of the higher quality portion of that debate). That debate took place on a slanted playing field where the pro-war side had the mantle of the zeitgeist on their side, and the anti-war side was generally on the defensive. e.g., There was often an implicit or explicit question of whether opponents of the war were apologists for Saddam Hussein, and so people making an argument against the war might head it off by including something about how they agree that Saddam Hussein is a bad person who has done some awful things. Whereas it was rarer for war proponents to include something about how Saddam Hussein hadn't been involved in 9/11, or to get pushback for not including that (though it did sometimes happen, especially in higher quality debates or discussions among people who were left-of-center or more distrusting of the Bush administration).

There were a wide range of pro-war cases, including (more on the left) "liberal internationalists" who wanted there to be more constitutional liberal democracies and thought that toppling a bad government and replacing it with a good one was a feasible and good thing to do, and might spread to more of the middle east and make the world a safer place. Others (more on the right) wanted the US to kick some ass so that people/countries would be afraid of getting America mad at them, and that this would help keep us safe. Or, more viscerally & less strategically, some just wanted to get back at people like the ones who had attacked us. There was some tension between these views, and not much effort to create a single coherent view out of them; they were all welcomed into the pro-war coalition.

I think part of the reason that support for the war faded gradually over the years, rather than evaporating during the first year of the war when it became apparent that Iraq didn't have meaningful WMD programs (or before the war when the weapons inspections didn't find anything) is that there were so many different cases for war. Partly this is because there were multiple coherent views on the point of the war that got discredited at different times - getting bogged down in a seemingly endless quagmire eventually undermined the "we'll kick ass so hard that others will be afraid to cross us because they might be next", and the developments of the new Iraqi government eventually undermined the liberal internationalist case, but those took longer than the WMD info. But I think a bigger part was that the pro-war attitude was more like vibes and side-taking rather than specific arguments about a concrete purpose for the war - see the post-9/11 rallying around the flag, the backlash against France, the "you're with us or your against us" talk & attitude, etc. Much of the debate & discussion over the war was more like this kind of side-taking than like arguments over whether we should go to war. Another example: saying that the war wouldn't succeed at accomplishing its proponents goals was often treated as being "defeatist" and felt to some degree like it was siding against the war and against the US. To some degree this side-taking intensified after the start of the war, because then the pro-war side was the American side.

Eg such an incident could trigger a new "Patriot Act", except this time (in an administration that has zero qualms), it could go much much deeper.

I’m kind of confused by why these consequences didn’t hit home earlier

Many people who were opposed to the war focused on less persuasive argumentative approachs such as implying that anyone who supported it was a warmonger, calling Bush a war criminal or focusing purely on the number of deaths.

I suspect that people were more focused on expressing their frustration or signalling their tribal allegience rather than trying to actually change anyone's mind and that likely contributed to this delay.

FWIW, I listened to the following book about the war and it seemed quite good. I think it's the second book in a series about the war. 

"The Endgame: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Iraq, from George W. Bush to Barack Obama" by Bernard E. Trainor and Michael R. Gordon.

I think this post is missing a huge factor : oil.

“Of course it’s about oil; we can’t really deny that,” said Gen. John Abizaid, former head of U.S. Central Command and Military Operations in Iraq, in 2007. 

The Bush family had massive ties with the oil industry, including election funds, and there were apparently plans to invade Iraq before 9/11 according to former Treasury secretary (without a politically acceptable opportunity to do so, though).

More data in this article and the excellent book 'Oil, power and war', which shows that getting oil has always been a major factor in geopolitics over the last 100 years. 

Oil is not like any other resource - without it, the world's economies, food system and armies would crash within a week. Access to energy and resources is likely to be a major factor in political decisions as well.

I expect this to be a good but not perfect analogy to how an AI related catastrophic event could trigger political change. My understanding is that a crucial part of public discourse was, as other commenters allude to, a perceived taboo against being anti-war, such that even center-left reputable mainstream sources did not in fact doubt the evidence for Iraq's alleged WMD. Likely a crucial component is a sort of moral dimension to the debate ("are you suggesting we should not do anything about 9/11?") that prevents people from speaking out. 

I expect an AI related fiasco to have less of this moral load, and instead think that scenarios like the Whenzhou train accident or the bridge collapse in Italy 2018 are more analogous in that the catastrophe is a clear accident, that while perhaps caused by recklessness was not caused by a clearly evil entity. The wiki article on the bridge collapse makes it sound like in the aftermath there was a lot of blaming going on, but no mention of any effort to invest more into infrastructure.

Good evening.

I really enjoyed reading your analysis, especially as someone who's probably younger than many users here; I was born the same year this war started.

Anyway, my question for you is this. You state that 

"If there’s some non-existential AI catastrophe (even on the scale of 9/11), it might open a policy window to responses that seem extreme and that aren’t just direct obvious responses to the literal bad thing that occurred. E.g. maybe an extreme misuse event could empower people who are mostly worried about an intelligence explosion and AI takeover."

I've done thought experiments and scenarios in sandbox environments with many SOTA AI models, and I try to read a lot of Safety literature (Nick Bostrom's 2014 Superintelligence comes to mind, it's one of my favorites). My question has to do with what you think the most "likely" non-existential AI risk is? I'm of the opinion that persuasion is the biggest non-existential AI risk, both due to psychopancy and also manipulation of consumer and voting habits.

Do you agree or is there a different angle you see for non-existential AI risk?