This thesis addresses the “moral blindness” of the modern rational and impersonal bureaucratic system of state administration. The study uses Zygmunt Bauman’s critique of bureaucracy as a structure that holds the capacity to enable the exercise of large-scale violence as a technical task. Drawing on discourse theory and applying Norman Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) framework, it investigates how the U.S. national security discourse in the lead-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion framed the invasion. The elite bureaucratic discourse in the period 2001 - 2003 framed military intervention as morally necessary and inevitable. It constructed Saddam Hussein as a legitimate target and set regime change in Iraq as a bureaucratic duty. The real-life consequences of a military intervention were excluded from the narrative. The analysis suggests that the bureaucratic machinery, guided by technical responsibility rather than moral reflection, assumed war as a bureaucratic duty. Thus, material and human resources were concentrated on achieving a better military outcome rather than de-escalation. By highlighting the interplay between discourse, power, and bureaucratic momentum, this thesis contributes to critical understandings of how violence becomes embedded and justified even within democratic bureaucracies.