Twenty years ago, President George W. Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq, defeating the despot Saddam Hussein and creating a kind of hell that Iraq still struggles with.

Twenty years ago, with one notable exception, this country’s mainstream media bought bogus claims from the Bush administration about Hussein’s

Saddams

stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction

cheerleader

our country in a conflict that ended the lives of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. The war, along with criminally poor post-war planning on the part of the Bush administration, also spawned terrible sectarian strife, sparked the rise of ISIS, and displaced more than

a

1 million Iraqis.

That sad chapter in American history has spawned its fair share of jingoism

buzzwords

and sentences:

“MVW,”

the ashes of evil, regime change, yellowcake uranium, the coalition of the willing and a cheesy but terrifying chorus, repeated ad

nausea

by officials of the Bush administration

looks like

then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice: We don’t want the smoking gun to become a mushroom cloud.” (The memorable metaphor was coined by the late Michael Gerson, then a Bush speechwriter.)

Of course, there never was a smoking gun, mushroom-shaped or not.

Iraq’s stocks of

weapons of mass destruction WMD

was destroyed in 1991 after Iraq invaded Kuwait and was beaten back by a coalition of 35 countries led by the United States. The United Nations

S

The Security Council had also demanded that Iraq end its biological and nuclear weapons programs.

This is not to say that

Hussein Saddam

was an uprooted tiger; hi what not.

But he was also not the menace he was portrayed. Deceiving a public shaken to the core by the terrorist attacks of 9/11 proved to be a relatively easy task for the warming neocons of the Bush administration. They foolishly believed they could impose democracy on a nation without history.

Bush officials also made false connections between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks orchestrated by Islamist militant Osama.

B

in Laden and his terror group Al Qaeda. To his lasting humiliation, the late Secretary of State Colin Powell assured the world

a

speech to the United Nations just before the invasion that

the

was fully justified by the danger Iraq posed to the world.

My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed by sources, solid sources, Powell said. These are not claims. What you gave are facts and conclusions based on sound information. His statements, he later acknowledged, were patently false, many of which had been provided to U.S. intelligence by unreliable sources.

looks like

Ahmad Chalabi, an Iraqi opposition leader who dreamed of impeachment

saddam

Hussein and taking power in Iraq.

Powell’s statements are among those documented

in 2008

by the Center for Public Integrity, which collected the hundreds of lies told by Bush and his top officials as part of a campaign aimed at persuading the American public to support the invasion of Iraq under decidedly false pretenses.

most media

Press,

said the center, largely complicit in its uncritical coverage of the reasons for going. There was one glaring exception to that complexity. Three reporters and an editor from Knight-Ridders’ Washington bureau were the only major news organizations to question the government’s narrative on weapons of mass destruction. Jonathan Landay, Warren Strobel and Joe Galloway, with their editor John Walcott, poured water on so much of what the mainstream media reported. The drama was captured in “Shock and Awe”, a 2017 feature film by Rob Reiner, who plays Walcott.

In 2013, on the 10th anniversary of the invasion, Walcott told me his team was driven by skepticism, journalism’s most precious resource.

Most of the government’s arguments for this made absolutely no sense, especially the idea that Saddam Hussein was an ally of Osama bin Laden. A secular Arab dictator allied with a radical Islamist whose goal was to overthrow secular dictators and restore his caliphate? The more we examined it, the more it stank.

Also, he said, instead of relying on high-ranking government officials, they sought out lower-level personnel who were not political appointees and less likely to parrot the president to stay in his good graces.

Knight-Ridder spun story after story, undermining the government version (and the New York Times, Washington Posts, and Los Angeles Times) of

Saddam of Hussein

possibilities. Some of the Knight-Ridders’ own newspapers, including the Philadelphia Inquirer, refused to publish the stories for fear of being contradicted, especially by the New York Times, which rejected credulous coverage of the WMD issue some 15 months after the invasion. stated.

It is still possible that chemical or biological weapons are being unearthed in Iraq, the Times editors wrote, but in this case it seems that we, along with the government, have been brought in.

Of course it was

a

strongly opposed the invasion of Iraq in the US and around the world, although in the first few months of the conflict a majority of Americans surveyed were in favour.

It didn’t take long for disappointment to set in. After all, where were all those Iraqis that Vice President Cheney had promised would greet American soldiers as liberators?

Cheney has never apologized for his role in the Iraqi gaffe (as far as I know he’s still defending it). Nor has Bush, though he has recently, as if accidentally, admitted the truth.

In a speech last May at the Bush Presidential Center in Dallas, he said it was one man’s decision to launch a completely unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq, I mean Ukraine.

He flinched, then added almost under his breath, Iraq too.

@AbcarianLAT