The Times columnist Thomas Friedman was a forceful advocate of the invasion, promising that if Saddam Hussein's regime is overthrown, Iraq will blossom into a democracy. Friedman also claimed that the Iraqi democracy will become a model for the Islamic nations of the Middle East. Twelve years later and hundreds of thousands of people killed, we know how accurate Friedman's "predictions" were.

Other Times journalists also contributed mightily to the hysteria surrounding Iraq and its nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. Together with Michael R. Gordon, the Times chief military correspondent, Judith Miller kept publishing on the front page of the Times propaganda from Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress and the neocons. The two kept claiming that Iraq had active programs for producing weapons of mass destruction, most infamously the lie about the aluminum tubes that Iraq was supposedly buying to use them in its nuclear weapon program.