There were a few reasons but an important one is that Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Rumsfeld were convinced by Laurie Mylroie that Iraq really had something to do with 9/11 and everybody in the administration was paranoid about another attack. Wolfowitz also felt guilty about the George H. W. Bush administration abandoning the Shiites. All of them (except maybe Powell and Armitage) already disliked Iraq, felt like the first war was unfinished business, and didn't need much prodding to go after Saddam but the 9/11 connection they thought existed gave it urgency. Ultimately it came down to Bush and he probably thought it sounded like a good idea and not for any particular reason.
Cheney and Rumsfeld had a history of paranoid fantasies going back to their Team B fake "missile gap" work in the 70s.
Both of them knew how to work the DC machine, but neither of them were ever bothered by little things like "facts". I don't think we'll ever know what they really believed.
I don't know what they mean by AI but this reminds me of an old fortune:
*** Special AI Seminar (abstract)
It has been widely recognized that AI programs require expert knowledge in order to perform well in complex domains. But knowledge alone is not sufficient for some applications; wisdom is needed as well. Accordingly, we have developed a new approach to artificial intelligence which we call "wisdom engineering". As a test of our ideas, we have written IMMANUEL, a wisdom based system for the task domain of western philosophical thought. IMMANUEL was supplied initially with 200 wisdom units which contained wisdom about such elementary concepts as mind, matter, being, nothingness, and so forth. IMMANUEL was then allowed to run freely, guided by the heuristic rules contained in its heterarchically organized meta wisdom base. IMMANUEL succeeded in rediscovering most of the important philosophical ideas developed in western culture over the course of the last 25 centuries, including those underlying Plato's theory of government, Kant's metaphysics, Nietzsche's theory of value, and Husserl's phenomenology. In this seminar, we will describe IMMANUEL's achievements and internal architecture. We will also briefly discuss our recent efforts to apply wisdom engineering to oil exploration.
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