The take: “Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction. We must invade to protect ourselves.”
Who said it: George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Tony Blair, and most of the US Congress (a who’s who of “trust me bro”).
Why it is wrong: There were no weapons of mass destruction. Let me repeat that: THERE WERE NONE. The US intelligence community knew there was no evidence. The UN inspectors said there was no evidence. The Iraqi defector who claimed there were WMDs was lying (his name was “Curveball,” which sounds like a cocktail but was actually a con artist). The administration cherry-picked intelligence, ignored contradictory evidence, and presented speculation as fact.
The result: over 4,000 American soldiers dead, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians dead, the destabilization of the entire Middle East, the rise of ISIS, and trillions of dollars spent. All based on a lie (sorry, “intelligence failure” if you want to be polite about it).
Colin Powell’s 2003 UN presentation, which he later called a “blot” on his record, was the most effective propaganda piece of the 21st century. He showed satellite images and talked about mobile biological weapons labs. None of it was true. But it convinced the world to go to war. Imagine being that good at your job and that wrong at the same time.
Book recommendation: The One Percent Doctrine by Ron Suskind. The inside story of how the Bush administration decided to go to war and then found the intelligence to justify it (putting the “intelligence” in “intelligence” in heavy quotation marks).
Coming soon: “Trickle-Down Economics Works”